


(On Another Night) We Were Lovers in the Moonlight

by semperpugnandi



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Enemies to Lovers, F/F, NASA AU, Slow Burn, aka it becomes a supercorp story eventually, apollo program au, bed sharing, but i have to yell at you about lilliza first, don't worry about the supercorp thing rn that'll make sense later, i'm very in love with eliza and lillian but not as much as they are with each other, lots of gay yearning, what other tropes are gonna be in here
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:47:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 40,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24191557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/semperpugnandi/pseuds/semperpugnandi
Summary: Eliza Worthington graduated top of her class at MIT, earning her an esteemed spot straight out of her PhD program at the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center. With Project Apollo just beginning to gain full steam and the country's hopes of reaching the moon by the end of the decade now resting partially on her shoulders, Eliza is determined to prove her worth in the male dominated labs... even when, in a cruel twist of fate, she's forced to work with her grad school rival Lillian Marshall.Or the Lilliza NASA au.
Relationships: Eliza Danvers/Lillian Luthor, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Comments: 41
Kudos: 137





	1. 1967

**Author's Note:**

> Alright guys, I'll be the one to do it. Here's a full fic dedicated to Supergirl's under-appreciated power couple Lilliza. 
> 
> This fic is my baby, and I've probably done more research for this than I did for my senior capstone project, so please don't blast me on scientific/historical inconsistencies. Some things had to be changed for ~gay drama~ (and also just... overall flow of the fic).
> 
> Title from You Have Stolen My Heart by Brian Fallon.
> 
> Enjoy!

The building smelled of a strange mixture of bleach, coffee, and sweat. One look at the people bustling around her said everything she needed to know about her next few years, as a vision swept through her of endless late work nights and hardly any time spent in the rundown apartment she had just signed a lease on. She may have graduated top of her PhD program at MIT, but merely two steps into the Manned Spacecraft Center, and Eliza Worthington felt out of her depth.

These were the people who would put a man on the moon, she thought to herself in awe. And she was meant to be one of them.

“New recruits are down the hall to the left,” someone called out behind her, and before she could turn and address the man who had given her the direction, he had disappeared into one of the seemingly endless rooms.

Biting her cheek, Eliza let out a soft sigh before nodding and stepping forward down the hall. No one paid her hardly any mind as she moved through the regular bustle of people going from meeting to meeting, but her body remained tense as she gripped onto the folder in her hands. When she reached the end of the hall, she held her breath as she read the sign indicating the direction the new hires were convening to branch off into their separate facilities.

Centering herself and taking a long breath while closing her eyes, Eliza finally pushed into the doorway and was met with a low hum of chattering throughout the large room. A man was waiting at the door and glanced up at her briefly before pointing to the other side of the room.

“Mathematicians meet over there, ma’am,” he directed, already turning his eyes downwards in disinterest, but she stayed rooted in her position.

A beat passed awkwardly as Eliza waited for the man to look back up at her, but when he didn’t, she cleared her throat softly and inquired as confidently as she could manage, “And where do the engineers meet?”

The man seemed to freeze at the question, and let out a little laugh before his eyes once again met hers, and Eliza clenched her jaw as she recognized the condescending look in them. “Trying to find a husband already?” he goaded with a sickly sweet smile, and Eliza attempted to keep her face plastered pleasantly.

“My name’s Eliza Worthington, and I was just hired out of MIT,” she responded easily, ignoring his dig. “As an engineer,” she followed up pointedly, and the man studied her carefully before pointing to the opposite side of the room.

“My mistake,” he stated with no sincerity in his tone. “I wasn’t aware there were any junior engineer hires.”

Bristling at his tone, Eliza bit back her response and smiled sweetly as she turned and made her way towards the side of the room he was pointing towards, her face dropping into a frustrated frown as she took a seat around all the men chattering around her. Bad enough getting talked down to throughout her PhD program. A sticky sensation began to sweep through her body as she realized she may have willingly signed herself up for even worse conditions here.

But this was her dream. Expanding humanity’s horizons. Learning the unknown. Pushing boundaries nobody even knew existed.

She would just have to push the more tangible boundaries while she was at it.

Setting her jaw, she stared straight ahead, ignoring the whispers she could now hear coming from the men at her side. Letting out a steady breath, she forced their speculation to become background noise. She’d been in the boys club in undergrad and graduate school. She would do it again. It was 1967, and sooner or later, the world would have to adapt to Eliza Worthington in a man’s place.

The whispers seemed to increase, however, and when Eliza became tempted to look over at the men, a flash swept beside her and calmly entered the row of seats in front of her, sitting down just in front of Eliza.

Widening her eyes, a coolness seemed to seep into Eliza’s blood as she immediately recognized the newest member of their group.

Lillian Marshall. Eliza’s biggest thorn in her side in grad school.

Biting her cheek, she slumped in her seat a bit, not quite believing her luck. Dealing with the men would be one thing, but Lillian on top of them? The snob was always talking over her and patronizing her, as if they both hadn’t been top of their class. Her reactions towards Eliza ranged from ice cold and impassive to staring at her like she was from outer space. And it didn’t help matters that whatever Lillian said went, as her word was backed by the Marshall name, which in turn was backed by millions of reasons that came in the form of U.S. currency.

NASA was a large institution, Eliza told herself as she folded her arms across her chest. There were thousands of projects and research teams happening at any one time. She would probably never see Lillian again, even if they worked in the same building every day.

“Alright everyone, I have your assignments here,” a man announced, walking to the front of the room and addressing the engineers, who all perked up in interest turning their attention away from the women in their midst. “I’ll call out the groups one at a time. I hope you’re all ready to be thrown into the fire; AS-204 goes up in six weeks, and you all will be busting your asses to make sure it does.”

Eliza clenched her fist and refused to show the nerves on her face in case someone was watching. Her mind quickly flashed through the basics of what she knew about the program to prepare for this position. Five years ago NASA had announced its official plan for a moon landing. Instead of a direct ascent to the moon or a Earth orbital rendezvous where the components of the spacecraft would be assembled in orbit around Earth, lunar orbital rendezvous was chosen as the optimal plan. This would require the large rocket called the Saturn V to transport a Command and Service Module and a smaller Lunar Module to the moon. The CSM would then stay in orbit around the moon while the LM descended; when the mission was over, the LM would transport the astronauts back to the CSM, before it was discarded and the astronauts returned to Earth in the CSM. Some officials at NASA still felt this strategy was too risky, but it was the only one that provided a small enough module for the moon landing.

“Okay, we’ll start with the CSM heat shield,” the man then continued to announce, and Eliza waited almost holding her breath for her name to be called out. The man listed through several other teams, and one by one, the men to her side stood to go recieve their folders and begin to disperse to their departments. The people sitting around began dwindling, and Eliza became more and more tense the more teams that were announced without calling either her or Lillian.

“Next we have the LM descent engine,” the man announced, pulling out two folders, and as he read the names, his eyebrows raised, and Eliza felt her heart drop. “The guys must really need some calculators over there,” he commented. “Eliza Worthington and Lillian Marshall: here are your assignments.”

Gritting her teeth and willing herself not to make a scene, Eliza stood calmly, but watched as Lillian stiffened in front of her. Slowly, Lillian stood to join Eliza, and her eyes met Eliza’s. In their quick unspoken conversation, they shared the same reluctant distaste at immediately being written off as well as being paired together. Eliza let out a sigh then and went to retrieve her folder, Lillian following immediately behind.

So much for never seeing each other again.

Much to Eliza’s dismay, it seemed as if her and Lillian had in fact been added as personal calculators to the LM descent engine team. Every day she walked into their lab space and felt like she was spitting on her degree. She was an aerospace engineer and yet every time she went to offer consultation, all the men in the room acted like they didn’t hear a thing.

Her only comfort was Lillian seemed to be getting frustrated at being ignored as well. At least they now knew the limits of wealth cancelling out sexism in the sciences, and that line seemed to be drawn right in the Manned Spacecraft Center.

Three weeks into their placement, and Lillian hadn’t said more than two words to Eliza. Which Eliza was more than okay with. As far as she was concerned, she just needed to keep her head down and keep proving herself against everyone else. Eventually she would be respected. Eventually she would be able to give meaningful input.

Eliza walked into the lab after lunch one day, carrying her lunch bag and steeling herself for another dull afternoon where she was given calculation after calculation to plug numbers into. To her surprise, however, the room only had one other occupant so far.

Lillian was sitting at the other end of the lab, eyebrows furrowed as she studied the paper sitting before her and wildly scribbled onto a pad at her side. Eliza watched her curiously, as she hadn’t seen Lillian concentrated and clearly excited about what she was working on since they started here. Eliza clenched her jaw slightly at the thought of Lillian getting handed actual engineering to oversee instead of her.

“Where is everyone?” Eliza finally cleared her throat and inquired, and Lillian’s head whipped up to face Eliza as a guilty expression fleeted over her face. Realization dawned on Eliza and she raised her eyebrow knowingly as Lillian narrowed her eyes into a suspicious glare.

Finally after a few moments of tense silence, Lillian responded, “They all decided to go watch Apollo 1 astronauts perform the plugs out test for the CSM.”

Eliza nodded shortly at this, remembering the men talking about getting access to see the test earlier in the week. Her eyes wandered down to the paper in front of Lillian. “And you decided to stay back and work on…” Eliza inquired, trailing off as her eyes met Lillian’s.

Snatching the paper from in front of her and stuffing it into a notepad, Lillian didn’t answer Eliza and instead pulled out a folder that had the assigned calculations Eliza recognized. This was all the confirmation she needed to know she had assumed correctly. Lillian had been making her own modifications to the engine while everyone else was away. It wasn’t hard to realize the men had been keeping them so preoccupied with the calculations so the girls didn’t have time to fully form any suggestions or plans for the engine.

Eliza had been working on some designs herself when she would get home late at night. She supposed it shouldn’t surprise her that Lillian was doing the same.

Without prodding any further, Eliza sat down across from Lillian, glancing up at her every so often as she pulled out her own calculations for the day. Eliza was itching to reach over and look through Lillian’s designs; as begrudgingly as she would admit it, Lillian always seemed to come up with some pretty spectacular ideas in grad school. She just wanted to see what she was up against. 

Instead, however, she submitted herself to knocking out as many calculations as possible while the lab was peaceful. Even with Lillian still sitting across from her, the air in the lab seemed lighter without the men looking over their shoulders constantly. 

They worked in a comfortable silence for a while, Lillian working at her modulated speed, writing carefully as Eliza scratched out her work. Biting her tongue, she considered asking Lillian why she worked so much slower than Eliza knew she could. She knew the reason would either be because the work was tedious and never ending or because they couldn’t afford to make mistakes. Any slip up could ruin their credibility, and they didn’t have a lot of it to begin with.

If they were on any semblance of friendly terms with each other, Eliza might have tried to inquire if Lillian had heard that the United States, United Kingdom and Soviet Union had all signed the Outer Space Treaty earlier that day to fill the silence. The treaty was almost a miracle in the current political climate around the world, but Eliza had almost let out a sigh of relief when she saw the news. Space would continue to be neutral territory of peace and exploration, the two best human endeavors, Eliza thought satisfiedly.

Around an hour into their work session, Eliza lifted her head as her ears strained a bit and she seemed to hear a loud buzzing noise coming from far away in the building. She furrowed her eyebrows, and Lillian seemingly heard the alarm as well, as she looked up at Eliza confused. Without saying a word, they both stood from the table and walked to the doorway peaking their heads out, trying to discern the direction the alarm was coming from.

When they seemingly noted the direction of its source, both Eliza and Lillian froze, holding their breaths as they realized what was in that direction.

“You don’t think-” Eliza started, biting down and unable to finish her sentence as fear spun in her stomach.

“No,” Lillian responded easily, but there was a detectable waver to her voice, as if she were trying to convince herself. “It was a plugs out test. No fuel, no pyrotechnics. It doesn’t get any safer than that.”

Eliza bit her lip, and after a moment, she gave into the dread in her stomach and stepped out of the room towards the alarm, her steps feeling heavy. Without a word, she felt Lillian’s presence behind her, following her as they both swallowed the worry down to their stomachs. Something was wrong, but neither had the strength to say it. Neither had the strength to even think of the possibility. But the fear and worry still gnawed at their guts.

The closer they got to the test launch pad, the louder the alarms became, and they began to hear the screams and the yelling. Eliza stopped, and Lillian’s arm nearly brushed hers. Both of their faces were pale now, as they couldn’t see anything, but unmistakably, something went wrong.

Two men came racing past them then, and Eliza snapped into action.

“What’s going on?” she called out, walking quickly to follow them towards the alarm, and while one of the men just continued to run as if he didn’t hear her, the other turn briefly and began to run backwards as he answered.

“We don’t know. There was a fire. The guys were inside the CSM doing the test, and then just-”

He couldn’t seem to find it in himself to finish the sentence, so he instead turned and ran after the man he was originally with.

It seemed to stop Eliza in her tracks however. She took a deep breath, and then strode forward to the launch pad, clenching her fists and praying it wasn’t what it sounded like.

The testing launch pad was chaos. There was smoke everywhere, people yelling and screaming and running to try and help. The entire CSM capsule was engulfed in flames and the rescue crew seemed to be properly held back from it.

Not that it mattered, Eliza thought as her stomach churned. One look at the capsule would tell anyone there was no chance the three men inside would still be alive. Flames were coming out of every which side, and it engulfed and scorched the words painted on the side: ‘APOLLO ONE’.

Lillian showed up at her side again, her jaw clenched and eyes staring hard at the disaster. They were quiet for a long moment before she murmured, “We killed them.”

Not able to look at it any longer, Eliza turned on her heel and headed straight for the closest women’s restroom. She threw up the moment she was in the stall.

Three days after the accident, the second chief flight director called all the engineers into Mission Control. It felt like everyone had been holding their breaths for this meeting. Work had all but stopped, everyone wondering what came next. All you had to do was walk down the halls for ten seconds and you would hear the whisper of rumors that the program was being shut down.

The politicians no longer trusted NASA, and no one could find it in themselves to blame them. Three men died in what was supposed to be an infallibly safe ground testing. They’d betrayed three of their own; let down three of their own. How could they all strive for the moon when they left three men on the launch pad?

An investigation committee was being put together to figure out how this had happened. Everyone knew it would take months for them to come to a conclusion, and all tests had been grounded until then. Their schedule was dissipated; benefactors would pull out; they would be criticized if they continued. The late President’s dream may not be enough to keep the Apollo program alive. It was hard for anyone to come to the conclusion that this all hadn’t come to a devastating end before they had even begun.

When Director Kranz walked up to the podium in front of them, everyone in the audience began to rustle a bit, feeling it in their bones. This was the end.

Eliza squirmed a bit next to Lillian. They had been shoved in the back, standing uncomfortably by each other and sticking out like sore thumbs in the room full of men.

Director Kranz cleared his throat, and the room became so quiet, they could have heard a pin drop.

“Three days ago, we failed three of the best men to ever step into this space program,” he finally began, and Eliza squeezed her hands together. “We lost sight of our purpose, of our mission. We became focused on schedules and deadlines, every day looking at what needed to be done for the next and not at problems we needed to fix. We put ourselves in a position that everything we did put us in a more dangerous situation. We will not let this happen again. We cannot let this happen again.

“From this day forward, everyone in this room lives by two words: tough and competent. Tough because we all will forever bear the burden of the decisions we make in this building: succeed or fail, we carry this with us for life. We will not lose sight of this responsibility above all else. Competent because we will be perfect. We will never take anything for granted; we will check every number, every decimal point a thousand times. We will never fail our men again.

“When you leave here today, go to your offices and labs, walk straight up to your blackboards, and write these two words in the corner. They will serve as a daily reminder of what we are here to do, and the price we made Grissom, White, and Chaffee pay for losing sight of our mission. These words will never be erased. These words are the price you pay to earn your spot here in Mission Control. It’s a new era at the Manned Spacecraft Center. You’re all dismissed.”

Everyone seemed to let out a breath at the end of the speech, and Eliza found that she had been withholding tears in her eyes. Blinking them back, she swallowed thickly and nodded, a firm resolve settling in her stomach and a calm sweeping over her body that had only been restless for days. In the world of endless possibilities, she knew she and everyone else knew there was one possibility that would never happen again.

They wouldn’t lose anyone else during the Apollo program.

As they all headed back to their labs, Eliza walked silently with Lillian, neither saying a word to each other, but Eliza couldn’t find the energy in herself to be annoyed at her presence, or that they were forced to be around each other because they were the only women. Instead, a seed of peace started to take root in her that she had someone else to share the same experience with her. Even if they competed. At least they weren’t alone.

Their project manager Dr. Staudhammer wrote “TOUGH” and “COMPETENT” in big bold letters in the corner of their blackboard the moment they returned to their lab. For good measure, Eliza wrote it on the inside of her folder as well. Until this point, she had been viewing her calculation work as a burden or an injustice. But they were all in this together. Every calculation counted. She couldn’t lose sight of that again.

When she glanced up after carefully writing the words, her eyes briefly caught Lillian’s, which were watching her thoughtfully, but quickly turned downwards when she had been caught. Eliza opened her mouth to say something, but found she had nothing to say.

“Alright, listen up team,” they both heard Staudhammer announce from the front of the room, pulling everyone’s attention. “Consider everything we’ve done so far for this descent engine Phase A. Today marks the beginning of Phase B. If there’s a bolt out of place on this thing, I want a report on it. If there’s a hairpin discrepancy in the data, I want five more tests done to figure out exactly what went wrong. We are sending our guys to the moon in this lunar module. Getting them there safely is not enough; we have to bring them home. And god help us, our engine will do that if it has to. Now get back to work.”

The men all packed up and trickled out of the lab that day at their normal time. But Eliza and Lillian felt pulled to their work, dedicated to checking and rechecking with a newfound vigor. When the last man left, Eliza almost expected Lillian to look up at her and say something. As if she had been staying and working for so long just to get Eliza alone. Her watchful gaze from earlier was burned into Eliza’s memory, but as she almost held her breath and waited for something to change or shift now that they were alone, she was almost dismayed as Lillian just continued to work diligently, never looking up from her work.

Eventually, Lillian sighed, and Eliza glanced up at her and watched as she stood and began to pack up her things. When everything was placed back in her desk, and threw her bag over her shoulder, she silently pushed her chair in and turned to leave without acknowledging Eliza.

“Lillian?” Eliza suddenly called out as Lillian had her back to her. Lillian froze, but didn’t make any move to turn back around. “I know you think I’m some simple-minded farm girl from-”

“That’s not what I think of you,” Lillian cut her off easily, turning back just enough that her hard eyes could meet Eliza’s.

Caught a bit off guard, Eliza stared at her for a beat, regathering her thoughts as Lillian waited for her to respond. Her eyes watched Eliza carefully, and her expression didn’t betray anything she was thinking. Her lips were pressed into a flat line.

Finally clearing her throat, Eliza continued, “Well no matter. I know that we don’t exactly see eye-to-eye, but I think we should work together. Both of us are only seeing half of the story with these calculations. If we put them together, we could see the full picture and catch things easier.”

Eliza shifted uncomfortably in her seat as Lillian’s expression remained neutral. Eventually, she nodded curtly and murmured, “Okay.” Then turning, she walked out of the room without once stopping to hear Eliza’s response or see her reaction. Eliza sat in her wake, staring after her and wondering what in the world possessed her to offer a truce with Lillian in that moment.

On her car ride home a half hour later, her thoughts wandered to what Lillian thought of her.

The end of March arrived with little pomp and circumstance. Everyone at NASA seemed to be keeping their heads down and working through as many of their issues as possible, waiting for the official report of what happened during the accident anxiously. While the Apollo program seemed to be still running, there was still the chance that the report could change all of that. What would they find, they all wondered.

Eliza heard rumors. It was the black hole of subjects in those two months. Everyone tried to talk about anything else happening at the Manned Spacecraft Center, circling around what they all dreaded. But no matter how many off-branches of topics anyone could come up with, they always got sucked into the same old conversation.

The guys who had been present during the test spoke of how it had been delayed by an hour because of the smell of sour buttermilk. How the smell must have spooked the men enough to get air samples taken. How there must have been a leaking gas that no one caught that had caused it.

People theorized almost endlessly, but Eliza didn’t see the point. The committee would come back with the answers. They would have none until then. But they all kept getting wrapped up in the aftershocks of the tragedy. Some days Eliza walked into the building and swore she could hear the alarms and smell the smoke; she always had to steady herself before taking another step.

The rumors didn’t end at the accident however. Where the second director Kranz responded with grace and determination, the director Shea seemed to be stumbling. There were rumors he was never seen without a drink in his hand. There were rumors the program would be shut down because of him. There were rumors he was being asked to step down.

Eliza tried to ignore the whispers. She knew all too well the pulls of a drink every night when she got home, just to lift the weight for a moment. Just a moment. To fall asleep feeling light, instead of heavy with sobs.

Lillian didn’t seem particularly inclined to speculate or gossip either, though she didn’t seem too inclined to talk to anyone. She did follow through on her agreement to share calculations with Eliza, but it hardly increased their day to day discussions. Just a few comments here and there, small notes of things to watch out for. No extraordinary findings. Not yet.

“Team,” Staudhammer pulled their attention one afternoon, and everyone looked up at him standing in at the front of the lab. Eliza and Lillian shared a wary glance as they turned their focus to their project manager. “In two days, the astronauts of the Apollo program are going to be here at Mission Control. Director Kranz has requested all the engineers attend a social with them on Friday to boost the morale around here. We need to provide a hopeful yet steady face at this; they need to have confidence there will be no more mistakes made throughout this program. I trust you can all handle this.”

Before anyone could respond or ask any questions, however, Staudhammer walked out of the lab, leaving them all to buzz quietly to themselves.

Lillian seemed unperturbed by the news as the rest of the room chattered excitedly. Instead, she turned back to her work diligently, and the furrow in her brow was reinstated as she glowered over some of her papers.

Eliza watched her carefully, before she decided now was as good of a time as any to try to have a conversation with the cold woman. “It’s exciting, isn’t it?” she suggested in a neutral voice, shuffling her papers about a bit, and Lillian barely quirked her head at her voice, but Eliza could tell she was listening. “Getting to meet the men we’ll put on the moon.”

Eliza saw Lillian’s jaw flex a bit as she clenched her teeth before she sighed and sat up a little, looking Eliza in the eye with that unreadable expression again. “I can’t say I’m really excited for more men from NASA,” she finally reported.

The laugh bubbled out of Eliza before she could stop it. Turning, she bit her cheek and shook her head, missing the smirk that cracked Lillian’s pursed together lips for just a second as she watched Eliza giggle.

“Who knows. Maybe the astronauts are different than the engineers,” Eliza offered, and she let out another loud laugh at the look Lillian shot her.

That Friday morning, Eliza had woken up at 4 AM to the same nightmare that had been haunting her for months. There were slightly different variations, but they all ended in fire. While her mind was supposed to be at peace, it betrayed her night after night, waking her to remember only flashes. The LM exploding on the launch pad, or in space, or on the moon. And every time, she knew who was to blame.

Rubbing her hands across her eyes, she shivered as she tried to pull the blanket up around herself. The heater had been broken for weeks now, but she hadn’t had the mental energy nor the time to call to have it fixed in those weeks. How cold could Texas really get, she figured.

Cold enough at night to make her uncomfortable, she was learning. But at least it woke her from the nightmares.

She tossed and turned for what felt like hours but was merely twenty minutes. Finally sighing, and sitting up, she accepted she wouldn’t be falling asleep anytime soon. Not today. How could she sleep and dream about killing the men she was supposed to meet that afternoon?

So instead, she relented, swung her legs out of the bed, and got up to get ready for the day. She took more time than she usually did, but it still left her ready to leave just after 5 AM. Deciding that pacing around her cold apartment was the worse option, she grabbed her keys and headed out to her car.

There were hardly any other cars in the parking lot of the Manned Spacecraft Center when Eliza pulled in at 5:33 AM. The building was eerily quiet as she entered, but she almost relished in the silence. No one here to stare and wonder where she belonged. No one to silently question her authority. And as she entered her lab, she let out a sigh of relief at the thought of sitting quietly at her desk, not speaking up and not having it feel like a defeat.

She sat her bag down with little ceremony, and shrugged off her coat, throwing it haplessly on the stool next to hers. The men usually didn’t show up until seven, and Lillian…

Well, she didn’t know what time Lillian usually showed up.

Shrugging it off, she pulled out the folder of her most recent calculations, chewing slightly on the end of her pencil as she studied the integral and reacquainted herself with the problem. She hunched over her desk for a half hour, flying through the data, and eventually tiring of sitting. She was always sitting day in and day out, she realized. Standing, and pushing the stool out behind her, she leaned her whole upper body over the table, taking up the opposite side as well, as she used to do when she was alone in the lab at MIT. The position was so ghostly familiar, she seemed to relax into it easily, her foot tapping a little on the floor behind her as she once again furrowed her eyebrows and lost herself in the calculation at hand.

When she heard the throat clearing from the doorway, she shot up, as if she had been caught doing something wrong. In surprise, her eyes met those of Lillian Marshall. Somehow her face seemed more closed off than normal as she silently watched Eliza from across the room, as if she were waiting for Eliza’s permission to enter the threshold of the lab they shared.

“You’re here early,” Eliza finally commented when her mind came up blank of anything else to say. She glanced down at her watch and saw it was 6:07. Lillian merely raised her eyebrow at this and looked at Eliza pointedly, as if implying the same thing about Eliza already being in the lab.

Thankfully, though, she took Eliza’s willingness for small talk as an invitation to join her, and Lillian crossed the room, gently setting down her things and not looking back up at where Eliza was observing her silently.

As Lillian pulled out her folders, Eliza spoke again for a reason she couldn’t fathom. “I came in early because I couldn’t sleep,” she offered, pausing a moment before she averted her eyes and tried to ignore the blush creeping onto her cheeks, embarrassed by the thought of oversharing with Lillian.

They were both silent for several long moments, and Eliza finally began to recenter herself with some steady breathing as she pretended to look at the paper in front of her, once again sitting down on her stool.

“My father called me this morning,” Lillian responded quietly, taking Eliza off guard as her eyes flicked upwards in surprise, and she found Lillian watching her almost expectantly. “I like to come in early to take my mind off him with work.”

Eliza swallowed thickly and nodded at the information, mentally storing it away in a safe place, acknowledging it was the first time in the four years she had known Lillian that she had willingly offered her information about herself. She opened her mouth to inquire more, further the conversation, but as she stared at Lillian now peacefully working, she bit her tongue. No need to push her luck, she told herself.

It was nearing seven when Eliza heard Lillian let out a disgruntled hum. She paused briefly, used to the quiet outbursts after months of sitting across from Lillian. When nothing seemed it would come of it, she turned back to her work. It only lasted a moment before Lillian huffed again, but this time, she looked up at Eliza afterwards.

“Do you have your interpretations from the injectors?” Lillian asked, her eyebrows furrowed. Nodding silently, Eliza reached to her side and began digging through her papers until she found the ones labeled for the engine injectors, pulled them out quickly and walked over to Lillian’s side as she looked over her shoulder.

Lillian seemingly didn’t notice her as she studied and compared the results, muttering to herself as Eliza slowly put together what they were seeing.

“The throat erosion patterns are inconsistent,” she commented, frowning. Lillian looked up at her quickly, and scooted to the side a bit, inviting Eliza to sidle up right beside her, their arms brushing as they both inspected it closer.

“Some of these have severe gouging,” Lillian nodded, pointing out what she was seeing. “Erosion alone isn’t necessarily something to panic over but-”

“Inconsistencies are,” Eliza finished a bit breathless, as her brain quickly racked through the potential issues at hand. 

Shaking her head a bit, Lillian bit her lip. “It could be several things though.” Before she could finish her thought however, someone else entered the room.

Both women looked up to see Staudhammer, barely acknowledging them as he sat down his briefcase and immediately went over to start coffee for the morning. Lillian and Eliza shared a look before they both nodded and stood.

“Dr. Staudhammer, I think we found something,” Eliza piped up first, hoping her voice wasn’t wavering as Lillian gathered the papers they had just been studying and brought them over to where their manager was standing. He glanced over at them before tiredly returning to his task at hand. Eliza bit her cheek a bit dismayed at the dismissal, but Lillian pushed forward despite his clear disinterest.

Placing the papers of their data analysis down on the counter, Lillian met Staudhammer’s eyes determinedly. “There are inconsistencies in the erosion from the injector, sometimes with severe gouging. It could be our coolant or the turbulence ring.”

“It could be the inlet hydraulics as well,” Eliza jumped in, easily. “Or maybe an uneven velocity distribution in the oxidizer fans. We would have to-”

At this, Staudhammer held up his hand to stop the two from continuing and he sighed as the coffee began brewing. Crossing his arms, he studied the two women for a long moment. Lillian met his gaze with her own steady eyes; Eliza shifted a bit under the pressure.

“You two worked under Dr. Samson in the Instrumentation Lab, right?” he asked, and they both nodded slowly. “Dr. Samson’s an old friend of mine. Said you two were the best PhD candidates he ever saw in his lab,” he explained simply, pouring himself a mug of coffee and turning to walk away, leaving the two women standing a bit perplexed.

Finally he looked up at them from his desk and told them, “I want a report on my desk by the end of the day Monday. No stone unturned. Figure out how we’re going to determine the problem and fix it, and I just might let you run the tests yourselves.”

He sat down then and turned away from them. None of them had noticed during the exchange that some of their colleagues had begun trickling into the lab, and both Eliza and Lillian fought back triumphant smiles as the men stared at them a bit disgruntled at the offer of a real position Staudhammer had just given them. Stealing sly looks, they both bit their cheeks and made their way back towards their desks, ready to begin on their first real assignment.

By the time that afternoon rolled around, they already had a significant start on their report. The work had been naturally divided between the two with Lillian listing and describing the possible issues and solutions, while Eliza began designing the tests they would need to complete to narrow down the problem. 

When everyone else began to pack up and head towards one of their large conference rooms for the social, both Lillian and Eliza wanted to protest in an effort to stay and work. One look from Staudhammer, however, told them that wasn’t going to be a possibility. Sighing, they both relented and organized their work and headed down to the social together, trailing behind everyone else.

As they entered the room, all the men were already socializing happily, leaving Eliza and Lillian to stand a bit adrift in the back of the room. Eliza noted that Lillian pointedly stared far away and came off as unapproachable to everyone. Folding into herself a bit, Eliza allowed herself to be shrouded by Lillian’s unamused energy. With these men, it was probably better if she didn’t interact anyway, she told herself. Even if they were all colleagues.

They stayed like that for nearly a half hour, Eliza people watching and Lillian coming across as bored. To their advantage, most of the men’s eyes glazed over them, as if they were part of the background in the room. Some noticed them, however, mostly with confused looks as if they were lost. Eliza had to fight to keep her cheeks from becoming red, the more men she caught staring at her.

There was one man, though, that kept glancing her way and his features didn’t bear any of those of their colleagues. Instead he looked curious, as if she were the most interesting person in the room, and she found herself quickly looking away every time their eyes met.

Eventually Lillian announced she was going to go across the room to get a drink. She asked Eliza if she wanted anything, to which Eliza responded “water” softly. Nodding Lillian moved away from her and into the crowd, seemingly unbothered by the situation she was in. Eliza watched her go until she could no longer see her in the crowd.

Biting her cheek, she intended to go back to people watching, but she noticed too late the man from earlier was approaching her. Her feet wanted her to move, but she felt grounded as he arrived in front of her.

“Hi,” he said expectantly with a charming smile, and Eliza found herself staring at him a bit amused. She wondered who he thought she was.

“Hi,” she responded easily, deciding to play along. “Do I know you?”

“No,” he answered, his eyes never leaving hers. “But you will. You see, I’m going to be one of the first men to walk on the moon.”

Raising her eyebrows as if she was shocked by this information, Eliza goaded, “Oh are you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied with a confident smile, and Eliza felt her stomach swoop ever so slightly.

Sticking out her chin cheekily, she told him, “Well then, I bet you’re thrilled to meet the woman who’s going to put you there.” She paused sticking out her hand as she watched his eyebrows now rise in interest as he softly took her hand. “Eliza Worthington. PhD in aerospace engineering.”

“Jeremiah Danvers,” he introduced himself a moment later. “I’m relieved to hear we have you on our…”

“LM descent engine team,” Eliza supplied with a small smirk.

Letting out a low whistle, Jeremiah shook his head a bit. “I’ve heard that’s been giving us some trouble.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Eliza offered without hesitation.

He offered her a soft smile then. “I bet you will, Eliza Worthington,” he stated sincerely. Glancing over his shoulder then to where his friends were calling his name, he turned back to Eliza. “I have to go, but I’ll see you around?” he asked, and Eliza held her breath as she nodded slightly and he was lost in the crowd.

Smiling to herself, she bit her lip and closed her eyes. She took a deep breath to steady herself, surprised to find herself shaking slightly. It had been years since a man approached her without the intention of criticizing or doubting her intelligence. Jeremiah Danvers. A name she wouldn’t forget any time soon.

When she opened her eyes and looked up, she was immediately met with Lillian Marshall’s eyes staring at her from across the room, and for the first time since the interaction, she felt herself falter. Eliza couldn’t remember the last time she had been able to so clearly read Lillian’s expression. Disappointment was etched all over her face, and Eliza felt her stomach drop a little. Did she know something about Jeremiah that Eliza didn’t?

But as soon as Eliza shot her a sad, questioning look, Lillian changed her demeanor. She raised one eyebrow, gave Eliza a cold, unimpressed frown before she rolled her eyes and shuffled her way back into the crowd. 

Eliza stared after her at a loss.

The report finally dropped at the end of April. Lillian and Eliza had spent one morning pouring over it, absorbing every detail. The three men had died from cardiac arrest after the fire burned through their protective gear and they were exposed to the high concentrations of carbon monoxide. A single spark had started the fire, most likely from the exposed wiring that carried power to the CSM module. From there, almost everything had gone wrong. The air inside the cabin was pure oxygen at a high pressure; the hatch cover couldn’t be easily removed for escape; there were combustible materials used all over the cabin.

But most importantly, the report found, was they were in no shape or form prepared for a disaster at this scale. There were no emergency preparations, no backup plans. They had simply planned for everything to go exactly right.

Grissom, White and Chaffee hadn’t stood a chance.

The report left a sour taste in both Eliza and Lillian’s mouth, even as they moved on and began preparing for their tests for the day. Lillian seemed more deep in thought than usual, often pausing as she hooked up the turbulator to the oxygen inlet and staring faraway at something, before blinking and shaking her head slightly and continuing on with her work.

Eliza wanted to pick her brain, but she bit her tongue and stayed silent. Whatever progress she had started making with Lillian a month ago seemed distant now. Some days she actually wondered if they had joked around at all, or if it had just been some weird fever dream. She tried not to dwell on it too much, tried not to let it get under her skin like it did in grad school. If Lillian wanted to keep things strictly professional between them, Eliza was more than happy to oblige.

One of the men came to get them after they had finished their first test of the day, and Lillian and Eliza looked up at him as if they were almost expecting it.

“Kranz is calling a meeting,” he called out to them, and Eliza bit her lip.

“Did he say what about?” Lillian asked, keeping her tone level, but everyone could feel the apprehension in the air. The man studied her for a long moment before sighing.

“No,” he answered, but they all knew what they were thinking. Kranz was going to announce whether they would still go to the moon, whether they had done enough damage control and reevaluation in the last months to give the Apollo program a chance.

Eliza’s skin crawled, but she found herself nodding and glancing over at Lillian, hoping for any support she’d be willing to give her. They had both been starting to gain ground and credibility with their team. Everything could come crumbling down in the span of one meeting.

Lillian’s eyes met Eliza’s briefly in a moment of vulnerability, and Eliza nearly let out a sigh of relief.

The man left as Lillian and Eliza began tearing down the necessary parts of their lab to safely leave it for an indefinite period. Neither of them said it, but they were both planning on coming back to work right after the meeting. They were both planning on having a job after the meeting. They were both planning on the Apollo missions continuing.

NASA would continue on past Apollo, that they knew. But when they scaled back on employment, the first to go would be the junior engineers. Especially if they were women.

Swallowing thickly once she was mostly packed up, Eliza stopped and waited for Lillian as she last minute scribbled some notes down in her notebook. When she finished, she stared at what she had written for a long moment before standing slowly.

When she turned and looked at Eliza, they both nodded at each other and made their way for the door, ready to meet their fate. Remaining silent as they made their ways through the halls to Mission Control, Eliza felt the heaviness in her stomach increase with every step. Her hands were shaking and her jaw was clenched almost determinedly. She had come so far, and it felt like fate was ready to rip her out of her achievements at any moment.

A soft touch on her forearm startled her a bit, and just as she was about to step into the meeting, Eliza stopped and spun around to see Lillian watching her with concern. She opened her mouth to ask Lillian what she was doing, but Lillian explained before she could.

“Relax, Eliza,” she murmured quietly. “We can’t go in there and show them we know we’re the first ones out. We have to show them we know exactly how much we belong here.”

Eliza pursed her lips and protested, “It doesn’t matter whether we think we belong or not if the program’s shut down.”

“It won’t be,” Lillian reassured her softly. “My father’s friends in Congress told him they would probably keep it going. Johnson supports it fully and he still has considerable sway in the Senate.”

Chewing on her cheek, Eliza considered this before countering, “But that’s not a guarantee.”

Lillian stared at Eliza curiously, her eyebrows quirking just slightly. “You’ve never been pessimistic before,” she commented, her eyes studying Eliza carefully, as if she were adding a new variable she had never considered before to a calculation.

Eliza’s cheeks pinkened slightly as she scoffed slightly. “I’m not being pessimistic,” she defended. “Just realistic. Three men died on our watch-”

“Hundreds of men die every day in Vietnam,” Lillian shot back. “If they’re willing to sit back as they send men off to war and destroy an entire country to put the Soviet Union in their place, they’ll be willing to lose three men to beat the Soviet Union in the space race.”

Eliza was quiet at this, taking in Lillian’s conviction before she finally relented and nodded slightly. She couldn’t argue with that.

“Okay,” Lillian then sighed approvingly. “Let’s go in there then and show them we belong here.” She squeezed Eliza arm softly, before slipping past her into the room, and Eliza stared after her, Lillian’s touch still lingering on her skin. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath, and then followed Lillian into the room.

The crowd was already restless, quietly chattering amongst themselves no doubt about their theories. Eliza tried to block the noise out as she weaved through the crowd and pointedly ignored their stares. Lillian’s words repeated themselves in her head, and she knew she had to appear unfazed by this meeting. Setting her jaw and setting a light expression on her face, she continued through the crowd until she saw Lillian standing in the back. There didn’t seem to be much room beside her, so Eliza went to turn to find a different-

Her train of thought was cut off when Lillian’s eyes met hers, and her body instinctively shuffling slightly to the side to indicate more room for Eliza. Without a second thought, Eliza pushed her way through the crowd until she was by Lillian’s side. She opened her mouth to say something as Lillian watched her carefully, but before she could, a loud voice boomed from the front of the room.

“Okay everyone, settle down, we have a lot of information to get through,” Kranz announced, and Eliza spun around to face him, not noticing Lillian’s eyes stay on her. “A lot has been happening and changing around here. I’m sure by now, you’ve all read the report. I expect everything in that report to be fixed or have plans to be fixed by the end of the week,” Kranz began, shuffling through his papers with a stern voice as everyone held their breath.

The crowd around them shuffled a bit, and a man uncaringly stepped into Eliza’s personal space so she could no longer see Kranz at the podium. She huffed a little, irritated but accepting her fate. When she felt the soft hand tug at her forearm for the second time that day, Eliza’s eyes shot up to Lillian’s in question, as Lillian responded with her eyebrows raised. With another soft tug the intention was clear, and Eliza sighed, stepping out from beside the man and pressing her body into Lillian’s a bit reluctantly.

“The wives of Chaffee, Grissom and White have requested AS-204 be renamed Apollo 1 in their honor,” Kranz continued, and Eliza's thoughts took a moment to refocus on the director and not on the warmth of Lillian behind her. “We are proud to grant that request today. From here on out, AS-204 will be referred to as Apollo 1, retiring the name in honor of some of the best men that ever walked the halls of NASA. We officially record the first manned Apollo Saturn test flight failed on a ground test.

“Furthermore, test flights AS-201, 202, and 203 will not be renumbered into the Apollo missions. Instead, to account for these previous tests, the next mission originally designated as AS-501 will be an unmanned all-up test with the Saturn V scheduled for this November and will be named Apollo 4-”

Before Director Kranz could get another word out, the entire room burst into cheers and Eliza let out a stunned sigh. The program was continuing; she still had a job; they were going to go to the moon. In a moment of relief, she sagged slightly backwards, leaning further into Lillian. At the contact, she whirled around in surprise, already apologetic, but Lillian only met her with an excited beam as she reached for her hand. Eliza gratefully interlaced her fingers with Lillians and squeezed, letting out a loud victorious laugh that was swallowed up by the surrounding cheers in the room.

The rest of the meeting passed in a blur, Eliza’s head buzzing the whole time and her hand never leaving Lillian’s. Lillian Marshall may have been a rival in grad school, but she was thanking every star she could name to have her as an ally in that moment. She was the only other person in that room that knew exactly how much Eliza had to prove.

Both women seemed too excited to speak as they walked back to their lab from the meeting. Eliza nearly bouncing on her feet, and Lillian hiding her smirk, which Eliza knew well enough at this point meant she was _really_ happy. It was an expression she reserved only for their biggest findings.

“I told you,” Lillian finally goaded as they entered through the lab doors, shooting a knowing look at Eliza’s glee. “We had nothing to worry about.”

Eliza let out a little laugh as she ran her fingers through her hair and shook her head slightly. With a smirk, she side-eyed Lillian slightly and observed, “Well you seemed nervous too, so I don’t think it was completely unwarranted.”

Lillian’s eyes shot up to hers, and a light blush painted her cheek as she tried to sputter. “I was only nervous because _you_ were way more nervous than you should have been,” she defended, a playful spark igniting in her eye, and Eliza puffed up her chest, feeling slightly emboldened by Lillian playing along. It felt like a truce.

“I was not that nervous,” Eliza shot back, her eyebrows raised a bit incredulously.

Scoffing, Lillian shook her head and commented, “Eliza, I’ve known you for almost four years now; I know when you’re nervous.”

Eliza frowned a bit at this, trying to keep her expression light, but the confusion was clearly written on her face. “Alright, Lillian,” she tried to shrug off as she sat down at her table, letting out a small snort as she pulled out her notes. “We’ve had, what? Four conversations in that timespan?”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t know you,” Lillian protested, her voice light, but when Eliza’s eyes shot up to hers, she held them there for a heavy moment.

“Alright you two, I need an answer,” Dr. Staudhammer burst into the room without notice, taking both women’s attention. “If Apollo 4’s going up in six months, I need to know if we’re going to have an LM descent engine to go with it.” His gaze tore into both of them, and Eliza and Lillian both shared a wary look.

Finally, Eliza took a deep breath and answered, “We’ve inserted a turbulator to the oxidizer inlet tube and removed the turbulence ring in the alabative thrust chamber. We’re seeing promising results so far and hope to have it finished by the end of the summer, but… I don’t think I can recommend sending up LM-1 in November.”

Staudhammer crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes at her. “And why don’t you recommend it?”

Swallowing thickly, Eliza cleared her throat and stuttered, “W-well, the LM unit isn’t required for that particular all-up test, just the CSM. It feels risky to send our module up with theirs on the first test.” The unspoken words hung in the room: the CSM team messed up before; who’s to say they wouldn’t again, taking the LM with it?

Humming at this, Staudhammer asked, “And what do you expect me to tell the director and our contractor when I inform them my team doesn’t feel comfortable sending up the module?”

Eliza flushed, biting her tongue and unsure of how to respond.

“Tell them to use one of the LM Test Articles,” Lillian finally pitched in, pulling Staudhammer’s attention with his eyebrows raised. “It’ll balance out the loading of the Saturn V, while not risking anything. It’s a gamble right now to know whether or not the descent engine will be ready in time. There’s other issues that surely need addressed. Why rush and risk it?” she explained easily, holding their manager’s gaze.

Finally, Staudhammer sighed, “Okay. I think we’d be pushing it as well. I’ll pitch your idea to the higher ups, but when the contractor comes to call, you’ll answer to him.” There was a warning tone to his voice that Lillian met easily.

“I’ll be happy to,” she responded without a waver in her voice, and Eliza glanced over at her warily. Staudhammer, however, seemed satisfied by this answer, and nodded before turning and leaving the lab.

As soon as he was gone, Eliza turned sharply to Lillian, ignoring the nagging under her skin and instead inquiring worriedly, “Luthor Corp is going to be angry if their LM isn’t on the first in-space Apollo flight, and you just signed up to take the brunt of that anger.”

Lillian met her expression calmly, explaining, “Well we couldn’t let them send the LM up; it’s still riddled with issues, you know that. It won’t be ready until next year, so there’s no use in sending it up in six months. Using an LTA is a great alternative.”

Eliza bit her cheek, not wanting to point out that it was _her_ alternative. She had mentioned it the week prior when her and Lillian had been discussing options, and now _Lillian_ would be credited with it. Sighing, Eliza bristled and grumbled, “I’ve heard Lionel Luthor isn’t someone to be on the wrong side of.”

Letting out a snort, Lillian shook her head as Eliza looked up at her solemnly, furrowing her eyebrows. “If I gave a fuck about what men like my father thought, I would have stayed home and gotten married instead of getting my PhD,” she pointed out, as she stared down at her papers and pointedly didn’t meet Eliza’s eyes.

Eliza watched Lillian for a long moment, before letting her resentment and worry seep out of her. Lillian and her had just formed a truce; it would be silly to get frustrated with her now. She spoke up when Eliza couldn’t and was her friend in a moment no one else was. For better or worse, Eliza trusted Lillian.

She just had the sinking suspicion it was for worse.

“How do you think it feels to be a teacher, where the biggest problem you face day to day is whether or not the kids turn in homework?” Eliza asked suddenly one day. Her and Lillian were eating a quick lunch in the lab, still hunched over their papers. Eliza had sat up to take a bite and asked the question unamused when it popped into her head.

Lillian snorted slightly, still bent over and making some notes as her food sat barely touched. “Having a change of heart about your career?” she inquired dryly.

Smirking slightly, Eliza shook her head, but then paused and sighed frustratedly as she stared at the Lunar Module Test Article sitting behind Lillian. “I did consider teaching,” she finally admitted softly, her eyes remaining firmly on the LTA. Pressing her lips together, she ducked her head downwards as she nervously played with her food, not wanting to acknowledge that Lillian had stopped writing now and was staring at her. “In undergrad. I was the only woman in the mechanical engineering program, and there was a semester I just thought to myself, ‘Why am I doing this? It’s so lonely.’”

She finally glanced up at Lillian, who held her gaze with an unreadable expression. After a long moment, Lillian nodded and commented softly, “I’m glad you stuck it out.” 

The air felt heavy around them in the moment and Eliza swallowed thickly, trying to think of how to acknowledge it. Before she could, however, Lillian took in a sharp breath and the energy fizzled away, as Eliza averted her eyes.

“Besides if you weren’t here, I’d have to work with Carl or Ben to figure out why the fuel is freezing in the heat exchanger, and I would probably single handedly get the Apollo program shut down if I had to deal with either of them for more than fifteen minutes at a time,” she commented easily, and Eliza snorted as she ducked her head down into her food and continued to pick at it.

None of the men on the LM Descent Engine team had accomplished anything that made her wish to work with them. Even as they were getting down to crunch time as Apollo 4’s launch date loomed four months in the future, she was glad her and Lillian were left to hammer out small issues on their own, while the rest of their team worked out the logistics of using the LTA instead of the LM for the upcoming mission.

Eliza opened her mouth to make an off-handed appreciative comment towards Lillian, when Lillian sat straight up and alert, picking up one of the papers in front of her urgently. Eliza held her breath for a few long moments before Lillian’s eyes shot up to hers wildly.

“It’s the helium,” she stated excitedly, and Eliza furrowed her eyebrows and sat up as she sat down her food and walked over to Lillian’s side of the table. “Each time the fuel freezes, it’s because it’s not flowing through the fuel passages as the helium is being used to bring the propellant tanks’ pressure up to regulator lockup conditions.”

Eliza could feel the excitement stir in her as she processed Lillian’s statement. “The amount of helium needed to cause that change in pressure could easily freeze the fuel if it’s not moving; we just have to find a way to-”

“Look alive, ladies,” Staudhammer announced from the doorway of the lab, and both women jumped up, a bit startled by the sudden intrusion. “Here’s your thirty second warning that Lionel Luthor will be walking through to see the progress on the descent engine.”

Eliza gritted her teeth down and swallowed thickly, as she tried not to panic at her manager’s proclamation. They knew this would happen eventually, but she had expected more of a warning, more planning before the CEO of LuthorCorp, the contractor for the Lunar Module, waltzed through the lab door. Eliza glanced over at Lillian, looking a bit worried and wanting to gauge her reaction, but Lillian’s face was set to impassive, and Eliza didn’t have the chance to question it before Lionel Luthor walked in unceremoniously.

His eyes immediately landed on Lillian, and he broke out into a wide grin. “Well if it isn’t Lillian Marshall,” he greeted, with the kind of smile on his lips that made Eliza want to step slightly in front of Lillian protectively. “How long has it been?”

Lillian stood slowly and met Lionel’s gaze with her eyebrows raised and a cool ease set upon her body Eliza had never seen before. “Long enough for you to have to call me Dr. Lillian Marshall now,” Lillain responded, a small challenge to her voice, and Eliza almost held her breath, waiting for Lionel’s reaction.

To her surprise, Lionel let out a loud chuckle to which Lillian smirked at slightly, and Eliza felt something rest in the pit of her stomach. Like this small interaction was somehow the confirmation she needed for something that she should have put together months ago, but was only just crossing her mind now.

Lillian and Lionel were on friendly terms. That was the reason she didn’t seem concerned when she went up against his company’s wishes to insist on sending up the LTA instead of the LM. It wasn’t because she was defiant. It was just because she had money and _connections_.

Eliza’s skin burned at the thought as she bit her tongue and frowned.

“You always were just like your father,” Lionel finally commented, and Eliza felt like she almost saw Lillian bristle at the comparison. “How is he?”

“Fine,” Lillian answered shortly, and then she paused, waiting expectantly for him to continue. When he didn’t she let out a small sigh and stated, “I didn’t know you were coming, Lionel.”

Shrugging, Lionel walked around the lab like he owned the damn place (though, Eliza supposed, in many ways he did), and he sidled up by the LTA, stopping just short of it before turning on his heel. “I’m just in town for a couple days. Wanted to see the first system test tomorrow. Heard you’re having trouble with the fuel freezing in some start up conditions?”

Lillian shook her head. “We think we just determined the issue,” she related easily, and Eliza bit her cheek that they hadn’t actually _proven_ they were right yet. “Without the fuel flow, the helium for the pressurization of the tank is freezing the fuel.”

“And so what solution is being put in place?” he asked easily, and Lillian paused, pressing her lips together as a beat passed.

“We could install an electrical heater,” Eliza suggested then, causing everyone to turn to her a bit surprised. Eliza wasn’t exactly one known to speak up during these conversations, but she didn’t know if Lillian even had a solution and wasn’t willing to risk both of them looking like idiots if she didn’t.

“An electrical heater?” Lionel finally inquired, considering the possibility for a long moment as he studied Eliza for the first time. “That could potentially work. We might run into some reliability issues-”

“Or we could use a pre-pressurization start bottle,” Lillian cut in suddenly, and all the attention switched back to her. “The configuration would be simpler and overall more reliable.”

Lionel let out a grin at this as Eliza tried to force her expression to remain neutral as she clenched her fist and watched Lillian warily. “Just the kind of brilliant idea I would expect from _Dr_. Lillian Marshall,” Lionel emphasized, and Lillian shot him a stiff smile back. “I look forward to seeing the rest of your ideas Dr. Marshall,” he then continued walking up to Lillian with a small smirk, and Lillian matched his expression easily before he turned and walked back out the door.

As soon as Lionel was out of sight, Lillian sunk back into her chair with a sigh, staring after him and the rest of the men walking with him and letting her body relax slightly. Eliza watched her for a long, tense moment, chewing on her cheek.

“You didn’t mention that you knew him,” Eliza finally pointed out, trying to keep the edge off her voice, but failing. She turned, not waiting for Lillian’s response and making her way back over to her lab table.

“I don’t really,” Lillian answered after a bit, her voice quiet. “He’s done business with my father. We’ve met a few times.”

Eliza looked up at her at this and raised her eyebrow slightly. “That seemed like more than just a few casual meetings,” Eliza pointed out, and Lillian didn’t meet her eye, instead electing to dig through her papers.

“What still needs to be done for the system test tomorrow?” she asked eventually, clearly trying to divert from the subject at hand, but her voice was thick, and Eliza debated on calling her out on it.

Eliza had never been one for gossip in grad school, but that didn’t mean she had been completely immune from it either. There had been whispers that Lillian had turned down a very prominent man in favor of attending grad school, much to her father’s dislike. Eliza wondered for half a beat if that man had been Lionel Luthor.

She immediately shook her head and pushed away the thought. Her jaw clenched slightly at Lillian being _romantically_ linked to the CEO of one of the largest companies in the industry. Scoffing slightly, Eliza frowned, realizing Lillian was always several steps ahead of her, and no amount of work in the world could get her onto equal footing. They might both be women, but Lillian was playing in a very different game than her.

“The valves need rechecked,” Eliza finally answered, her voice a bit distant and cold, but if Lillian noticed, she didn’t mention anything. They worked in silence for the rest of the day. 

By the time the next morning rolled around, Eliza was frustratingly doing all the system checks before they sent the LTA off to the rig by herself. Lillian had been MIA all morning, and while she could handle getting their checks ready for the system test, it was the reason she was sure Lillian was missing that was getting under her skin.

“I’m sorry,” Lillian apologized, rushing in through the doors as Eliza finished her last checks and went to call the team to move the LTA. She glanced disapprovingly up at Lillian who was setting down her bag and pulling back her hair, before she turned back to her task at hand. “Lionel stopped me on my way in and insisted I give him a tour of the test landings and rigs,” she explained hastily, stopping as she saw Eliza not paying her any attention. In fact, Eliza’s demeanor seemed to become cooler with the explanation, as she shrugged it off, unconcerned.

“You don’t need to apologize for keeping our contractor happy,” Eliza stated, a bit distractedly, but Lillian could hear the double meaning under the words and froze.

Lillian watched Eliza for a long moment, waiting for her eyes to look up and meet hers, but when they stayed pointedly focused on the paper in her heads, Lillian let out a shaky sigh. “You don’t know the first thing about me,” she asserted, and Eliza looked up at her with a slight pinched expression as she raised her eyebrows.

As she opened her mouth to say something, her eyes were diverted to motion by the doorway, and she quickly closed her mouth and turned to continue working.

“Lillian,” Lionel called from behind her, and Lillian stiffened slightly, before turning with a pleasant smile. “Join me for an early lunch?”

Eliza looked up from the corner of her eye as she watched Lillian swallow thickly and try to weakly protest, “I actually have to stay here and help with the-”

“Nonsense, the other girl can take care of all of it, can’t she?” he inquired, and Eliza felt both of their eyes rest on her as she tried to even her breathing.

The only gaze Eliza’s met was Lillian’s, who was asking her something through her undefined expression, but Eliza just gritted down and answered, “Don’t worry about it. You two have fun.” She sat down at the desk and buried her head in her papers without watching Lillian’s response. They were both gone before she looked up again.

She ended up working through lunch, eventually moving her notes out to the observation area where LTA-5 was being set up for it’s first system test. She idly worked on a few preliminary design ideas she had for the start bottle they were decidedly adding to the fuel exchangers, as she absentmindedly watched the factory tests being completed. She tried to tell herself she wasn’t watching the time and wondering how long it would be before Lillian joined her again, but as the minutes slowly inched closer and closer to the test start time, and more people appeared in the observation room, and Lillian was still nowhere to be found, Eliza was admittedly glancing up and checking for her company anxiously more often than she would ever admit.

A few minutes before the test started, Eliza glanced to her right and into the window of the other observation room for the rig, reserved for those with a large standing with NASA. She froze as she immediately recognized the only woman in the room, standing cordially behind Lionel Luthor as she was introduced to Director Kranz with a smile and a handshake.

Eliza was gripping her pencil so tightly at this point, she was surprised it didn’t break. Slamming her pencil into her notebook and closing it unceremoniously, Eliza let out a long breath to steady herself before glancing back over at the room. Lillian’s eyes met hers immediately, and they widened slightly, as if she were surprised Eliza had caught her, but before she could react any further, Eliza turned her eyes and decided she would not look back at Lillian for the rest of the test.

It was bullshit, though, she considered to herself bitterly. They had busted their asses trying to get this LTA ready for this test, and Lillian jumped at any chance to celebrate its success with a business man who only paid for its existence.

Gritting her teeth down, Eliza turned her attention to the rig, as it was announced the test was starting. The beginning seemed to go smoothly, Eliza watching with rapt attention, feelings of being snuffed by Lillian slowly seeping out of her and being replaced by pride. This was her first true test at NASA, she told herself, and she was standing it alone, successful, and-

In a sequence of event too fast for Eliza to process, Eliza’s eyebrows furrowed as a side panel of the LTA enchanger was ripped from the side, and in an instant, fuel from the exchanger was spewing out, almost immediately catching on fire and sending the whole LTA up in flames. Eliza stared at the scene with her mouth hanging slightly open as people began to yell out instructions in an attempt to get the situation under control around her.

Biting down, she swallowed thickly as the LTA was completely shut down, and emergency protocols were begun to put out the fire. The charred mess stood before her, and Eliza felt like sinking through the floor or throwing up. Her head spun as she tried to process what happened, but the only thought running through her head was that she did this. She ruined their only prepared LTA for the Apollo 4 mission, wasting millions of dollars in the process-

“Who did the pre-tests on the exchanger?” she heard a voice boom from behind her in the crowd, and Eliza shrunk into herself as she slowly turned to find everyone in the room parting a way between her and Director Kranz. Her voice felt stuck in her throat as Kranz sized her up with a glare.

Finally she managed to stutter, “I- I did, sir.”

“You care to tell me what the fuck happened out there?” he demanded, and Eliza clenched her jaw slightly as she refused to show any tears in her eyes.

“I have no idea, sir,” she answered evenly, trying to keep her breathing steady. “All the tests were normal.”

Kranz studied her for a long moment as everyone in the room seemingly held their breath. “I want to see the records of every test you did. You better hope all the tests were normal,” he leveled, and Eliza shot him a stiff nod, already feeling her stomach churn. She knew her job was on the line; he didn’t have to tell her.

After he turned to leave, Eliza ducked her head from all the eyes on her, grabbed her papers and hastily made her way out of the room, back to the lab so she could have the report on Kranz’s desk by the end of the day. She was so sure she hadn’t made any mistakes, but now she was doubting everything. Had she been so distracted she had messed up and missed something?

As she was almost out of the room, she heard a soft “Eliza” come from her side in an attempt to stop her, but Eliza pushed past Lillian without hesitation and strided hastily across the building towards the lab, barreling around anyone who happened to cross her path. The moment she was inside, she stopped, leaning heavily back against the door and taking the moment alone to clench her eyes shut and allow a few tears to stain her face. When she finally took a deep breath in, she stood slightly, staring at the empty lab a bit despondantly.

She held the peaceful moment for a beat, and then slamming the papers in her hand on the ground, Eliza stomped her foot down and screamed, “ _Fuck_!”

It had been a week since Eliza had submitted her report to Kranz of the LTA-5 pre-tests, and she hadn’t heard a word back since. Part of her wanted to believe that this was a good thing; if Kranz had an issue with her in the program, she would have been kicked out by now. But part of her also knew no news wasn’t good news. It mostly likely meant they just hadn’t determined the actual issue yet, which meant Eliza wasn’t off the hook, even if her tests had looked good.

Lionel had left the day after the disaster, and Eliza was doing her best not to resent Lillian in the week following. They resumed their roles of working in the lab, trying to discern what their next steps would be to ensure Apollo 4 stayed on track. Eliza sighed as she crumpled up yet another calculation that didn’t work out. It was late into a Thursday evening, but Eliza found herself pulling later and later nights ever since the failed system test. Whether it would work or not, Eliza intended to prove herself and not go out without a fight, even if it meant staying in the lab until 11 PM on her birthday. She had fought too hard to give up now. 

Or at least that’s what she had told herself this morning. But now the numbers were blurring together and what should have been simple calculations for her were getting jumbled together in her head. Lillian looked up from her side of the lab table to watch her silently as Eliza buried her head in her hands and stayed there for a few minutes.

“You’ve been quiet all week,” Lillian observed after a few moments of silence, and Eliza glanced up at her through the corner of her eye. “Usually you’re talking my ear off about the fuel exchangers and-”

“Maybe I don’t have a lot to talk about,” Eliza cut her off without looking up, furrowing her eyebrow as she bent back down and started another calculation.

Lillian was silent for a long moment, unmoving. “Eliza, tests fail. That’s why we do the tests-”

“We got lucky,” Eliza stated impatiently, rustling through her stack of papers. “We got lucky that it was a Test Article and not a Lunar Module with two men inside trying to make history. We-” she began before letting out a huff and letting her hand fall to the table with a bang. “I checked that helium-fuel exchanger fifty times over. There should have been no way that it leaked. And there should have been no spark. LTA-5 is destroyed and we’re going to have to completely redo all of our work to make another Test Article suitable for flight in four months if we don’t want to delay Apollo 4,” she related to Lillian, frustrated, and her eyes glared up at the woman before her.

“We’ll figure it out,” Lillian finally offered softly.

“Will _we_?” Eliza asked, unable to keep the accusation from her voice as she looked up at Lillian with a pointed look.

Lillian swallowed thickly before averting her eyes and staying silent for a moment. “Are you more upset that LTA-5 blew up or that I was with Lionel when it did?” she finally asked slowly, and Eliza felt her cheeks burn as she angrily pushed her papers to the side and stood.

“I’m _upset_ that you haven’t been focused when you needed to be,” Eliza asserted. “I’m _upset_ that our hard work went up in flames before my eyes and you didn’t seem to care. I’m _upset_ that I had to look like an idiot by myself while you hid behind Lionel Luthor.”

“So it is about Lionel then?” Lillian asked with her eyebrow raised, not betraying a single emotion.

Scoffing slightly, Eliza rolled her eyes and stated coldly, “When isn’t it about money and privilege with you?”

Lillian stared at Eliza for a long time, and neither seemed to breathe as they took each other in. Finally Lillian sighed with annoyance and stepped back to grab her bag, gesturing for Eliza to do the same. “Come on,” she stated tiredly.

Eliza furrowed her eyebrows and watched her. “What?”

“Come _on_ ,” Lillian insisted, gesturing for the door. “You’re being more of a bitch than usual and it’s getting on my nerves, so I’m going to buy you a drink.”

“But we-” Eliza started, before Lillian quickly cut her off.

“It’ll all be here for us tomorrow,” she stated easily. “Besides, I’m worried my work environment will become dangerous if I continue to allow you to be pent up like this.”

Reluctantly, Eliza mulled over the option in her head, but when she glanced back at the equations waiting for her that just made her head scramble at the thought, she finally conceded and grabbed her bag before following Lillian out of the room.

They walked in silence to Lillian’s car, one of the only besides Eliza’s that was left in the parking lot, and Eliza only hesitated for a second before sighing and opening the passenger side door. As she slipped inside, Lillian seemed to be pointedly not paying attention to her, instead buckling her seatbelt and turning on her car. Eliza quietly stared out the window as they made their way out of the parking lot.

It wasn’t long before Lillian was pulling up into the parking lot of one of the fanciest bars in town, and Eliza bit down her comment of not being able to afford to breathe the air in this place. If Lillian insisted on buying her an expensive drink, then who was Eliza to stop her.

As they walked into the bar, Eliza suddenly felt fairly self-conscious. The crowd wasn’t large for a Thursday night, but there certainly were enough people there to make her feel out of place in her second-hand office clothes. She hated it, but she stepped a little closer to Lillian, as if to make sure everyone knew why she thought she had a spot in this building. If Lillian noticed her presence closer than normal, she didn’t comment on it.

Instead, Lillian walked straight up to the bar and ordered two dark beers, and Eliza almost let out a relieved sigh that she hadn’t ordered anything super fancy or with some top shelf whiskey she would have to bite back a cringe every time while drinking. With the beers in hand then, Lillian led them over to a quiet corner of the bar, where they were left alone for the most part.

They both awkwardly sipped at their beer, waiting for the other one to speak. Eliza fought the urge to nervously pick at the table as she tried to think of anything to say to Lillian.

“I called Lionel earlier today to ask him if he had any word on why the exchanger ruptured,” Lillian finally started, unable to take the silence any longer, and Eliza looked up at her impassively. “He told me the factory tests they did exposed the exchanger to cryogenic temperatures while water was inside the fuel passages.”

“The freezing of the water would have caused a structural failure,” Eliza stated more to herself than anyone, realization setting into her as she processed the information.

“Yeah,” Lillian confirmed, her voice quiet, and she waited a moment to see if Eliza would speak up again. But when she remained silent and studied the table instead of meeting Lillian’s eyes, Lillian reassured her, “It wasn’t your fault, Eliza. You did everything right.”

Eliza glanced up at her with a thankful grimace as she tried to work through her emotions on the subject. Her job was safe. She didn’t have to prove herself anymore. A weight should feel lifted off of her, and yet, she still felt heavy. Lillian had been right, she realized. She hadn’t been upset about LTA-5, not fully. She was upset that she thought she’d finally made a friend, and the moment that friendship was tested, it fell apart. 

“I’m also sorry I wasn’t there that morning to help you,” Lillian admitted a bit ashamed, ducking her eyes down before Eliza could look up at her.

Eliza stared at Lillian for a long moment, biting her cheek as she considered Lillian’s apology. Maybe she had been a bit unfair to her. “I’m sorry I resent you for being rich,” she finally answered with a slight sigh before she took a long drink of her beer.

Lillian’s eyes shot up to hers with her eyebrows furrowed. “Present tense?” she inquired, with a hint of amusement at the edge of her tone.

“Yeah,” Eliza confirmed easily with a nod, before allowing the shadows of a smirk to cross her lips. 

“You know I am paying for your night out, right?” Lillian asked, biting back her own smile until they both dissolved into a puff of laughter and bowed their heads down slightly.

Eliza settled into the silence, pressing her lips together in the wake of her smile and fiddling with the glass in front of her. “Some days I feel like you don’t know what it actually feels like to be a woman in this field because your name still holds authority,” she finally admitted with a rush, and Lillian froze. “And it’s so frustrating because I want to be your friend, but everything feels like a competition with you, and I don’t have the resources to win,” she continued bitterly, refusing to look up at the woman across from her as shame burned through her. She wasn’t proud of her jealousy, and she hoped Lillian wouldn’t take offense to her statements. “Some days I feel like I deserve to be here more than you because I doubt you ever had to work for it, and I-”

She cut herself off when she heard Lillian let out a small laugh across from her, and Eliza whipped her head up and narrowed her eyes as she took Lillian in warily.

“What?” she accused, a bit on edge by the woman’s reaction.

Lillian merely shrugged and answered, “Nothing. Just never thought I’d see the day Eliza Worthington admitted to feelings that were less than perfect.”

Eliza stared at her with her mouth slightly open before she set her jaw and protested, “I’m not perfect.”

“Well, you act it,” Lillian countered easily. “It’s very aggravating how eager and non-confrontational you are at times. Feels like I’d be kicking a puppy if I took advantage of you,” she confessed a moment before a light blush coloring her cheeks as she took a long drink of her beer. Eliza scoffed a little, but relaxed at her explanation. “I don’t mean for things to come off as a challenge, by the way,” Lillian then continued, her tone more genuine than it had been before. “I seem to have inherited that from the Marshall household environment.”

“Competitive?” Eliza inquired curiously, as it was only the second time Lillian had ever brought up her family around her.

“You don’t know competitive until you’ve met Richard Marshall,” Lillian scoffed before shaking her head and taking a drink. “What about your family?” she asked softly after a beat. “You hardly ever mention them.”

“Not a lot to mention,” Eliza brushed off easily as she bristled at the question. She could feel herself closing off without really trying. No one had asked her about her family in years. “Small town. Small farm,” she continued vaguely, but Lillian still stared at her with interest, and closing her eyes, Eliza challenged herself to open up, just a little. “Growing up, my older brothers were my best friends,” she finally conceded, her tone more sincere than the moment before, and Lillian quirked her eyebrows slightly.

“You have older brothers?”

“Had,” Eliza corrected her quickly with a frown, but there was no edge to her voice. Lillian caught her breath and waited for Eliza to explain, though Eliza figured Lillian could guess. “They enlisted in the war together a few years ago. Didn’t even make it a few months.”

“Eliza, I’m sorry-”

“You don’t have to apologize,” Eliza assured her with a strained smile as she let out a sigh. “You didn’t decide to enter our country into a war that’s wasting life on both sides.”

Lillian was silent for a long moment, considering Eliza. “Fuck the war,” she finally stated bitterly.

“God, _fuck_ the war,” Eliza chimed in readily, her eyes meeting Lillian’s comforting ones.

They both settled into a comfortable silence, sipping their beer, and Eliza pretended she didn’t notice Lillian peering over her glass at her every so often, and instead waited for her to ask about whatever was on her mind. 

“Tell me about your brothers?” Lillian finally asked a bit breathlessly, as if she were certain Eliza would refuse.

And Eliza admittedly opened her mouth to do just that. To say she wasn’t in the mood to remember them. She was surprised when instead she said, “They were always getting in trouble.” 

She gritted down her teeth and closed her eyes, before she finally gave in and decided this was something she wanted to trust Lillian with. This was their moment. She had been wrong all those months ago. This, officially, was their truce. 

“Tommy was the leader even though David was older,” she finally added as the woman across from her waited patiently for her to continue. “Sometimes they’d let me in on pranks, solely so Mom wouldn’t punish them _quite_ as much,” she recalled with a small laugh that Lillian reciprocated. “We were all surprised when Tommy was the first one married; he never struck us at the settling down type, but we all loved his wife Susan a lot. She was good for him,” she explained, her throat thick with emotion. “David never did find a sweetheart, but he always had his heart set on inheriting the farm regardless. I asked him once if that was what he really wanted, staying on the farm forever, and he just shot me this stupid, wide grin and said ‘Lizzy, all of us know you’re the one destined to leave here and change the world’.”

This seemed to be the final straw Eliza could take, so she ducked her head and clenched her eyes shut in an attempt to compose herself. Her father had stopped talking to her when she refused to drop out of school and take over the farm, and her mother was still living in denial all these years later, talking as if David and Tommy would walk through the door at any moment. Eliza had used her research as an escape and a way to cope, never talking about her loss with anyone.

Until Lillian.

She tried to let out a small laugh at herself and offer an apology to Lillian, but before she could, she felt a soft hand placed on hers and squeezed softly.

“They sound amazing,” Lillian commented sincerely, and Eliza looked up at her with a grateful smile.

“They were,” she confirmed, bashfully wiping away her tears as she let out a shaky breath and got herself under control. “What about you?” she asked, trying to deflect the attention away from her. “Any siblings?”

“Just me,” Lillian answered simply, before pausing and adding, “much to my father’s dismay. They tried for several years to conceive a son after me, but it never happened.”

“Considering how you turned out, he still has to be proud of you though, right?” Eliza inquired, tilting her head slightly.

Letting out a small, grimaced laugh, Lillian shook her head slightly. “I unfortunately have a really outstanding record of disappointing him,” she answered a bit uncomfortably.

Eliza chewed on her lip considering this and considering if her next question would cross the line as she watched Lillian carefully. “Were you engaged to Lionel Luthor?” she finally blurted, unable to not ask the question that had for whatever reason been stuck in her head and bothering her every day for the past week.

Lillian’s eyes shot up to Eliza’s a bit startled for a moment, before she pressed her lips together a bit resigned, and Eliza felt her stomach sink slightly. “Not in so many words, no,” Lillian finally relented. “Him and my father had hoped after undergraduate I would settle down and help merge their companies, but when I got my acceptance to grad school, it was a clear signal to them that I was not playing by their rules.”

“Lionel doesn’t seem too upset about your decision,” Eliza pointed out. It wasn’t a question, exactly. But Eliza knew Lillian would hear the underlying question. If she had turned Lionel Luthor down before, why were they still on good terms.

“He still thinks I’ll marry him someday,” Lillian admitted with a long sigh, wrinkling her nose a bit before she finished off her beer.

Eliza bit her tongue silently. “Will you?” she finally asked softly, unsure what she wanted Lillian’s answer to be.

“I… I don’t know,” Lillian answered honestly, her eyes watching Eliza curiously before she shrugged. “It makes sense to. I don’t want to work for the government forever, and Luthor Corp is one of the best companies out there. And I’ve always wanted to run my own research facility and being married to a CEO might be the only way to do that.”

“But do you _want_ to marry Lionel?” Eliza pushed, her wide eyes watching Lillian carefully.

Lillian opened her mouth and then closed it again. She was silent for a long moment before she quietly admitted for what Eliza was sure was the first time, “Not really, no.”

“Then I don’t think you should,” Eliza advised easily, before finishing her drink as well. Something about the thought of Lillian marrying Lionel and being unhappy for the rest of her life got under Eliza’s skin. They were female engineers working at the Manned Spacecraft Center; they had well proved they could attain whatever they wanted from life.

Lillian’s eyes searched Eliza’s at this statement, as if she were considering something she hadn’t considered before. It was gone in an instant however, when Lillian took a sharp breath in and inquired casually, “What about you? Any suitors in your life?”

“No,” Eliza scoffed immediately, shooting Lillian an incredulous look. “When would I have time for that?”

Lillian shrugged uninterestedly and recalled, “That astronaut seemed rather interested in you a few months ago.”

Eliza froze a bit at this. She had almost forgotten about the interaction. “Jeremiah?” she questioned, furrowing her eyebrows. “I mean, I guess, but I haven’t seen him since.” She frowned a bit at the memory, trying to understand what Lillian was getting at, but when Lillian registered Eliza was uncomfortable at the subject, she immediately backtracked.

“I’m sorry, we don’t have to talk about this,” she offered.

“No, no, it’s fine,” Eliza assured her, trying to reset her expression more pleasantly. “I brought it up first anyway.”

Lillian swallowed at this before nodding. “Kind of predictable, isn’t it?” she stated with a humorless laugh. “The only two women in the workplace drinking together and talking about boys?”

“A bit predictable, yeah,” Eliza confirmed softly, biting her lip. “Lillian?” Eliza then continued, pulling Lillian’s attention with the tone of her voice. “I know I haven’t said it before, but I am grateful to have you to work with,” she admitted with a small smile, and Lillian’s expression softened immediately. “Even if you’re a bit pretentious at times,” Eliza then added on second thought.

Lillian let out an abrupt laugh at this before rolling her eyes and asserting with confidence, “Oh please, name a female engineer working at NASA right now that would be better than me.”

“I’ve heard Judy Sullivan over the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building is great,” Eliza teased cheekily. “And oh, I would trade you in a second for the living legend Katherine Johnson.”

“Alright, Worthington,” Lillian stopped her with a faux annoyance. “You can have them, and I’ll just go on back to MIT to work under Margaret Hamilton.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Eliza leveled, narrowing her eyes.

Lillian met her expression with a smirk and leaned forward slightly before murmuring, “Try me.”

Eliza huffed out a small laugh, as Lillian stood to go to the bar and close out their tab. Crossing her arms, Eliza sighed and stood, walking up to Lillian and standing close behind her as she received her change back. Then they were soon out the door.

They walked closely together as they made their way back to the car, their shoulders brushing every so often, but neither of them could seem to find the words to fill the silence. By the time they made it back to the Manned Spacecraft Center parking lot, Eliza was too tired to come up with anything to say regardless, and was almost grateful Lillian wasn’t trying to start a conversation.

After parking next to Eliza’s car, Eliza glanced over at her with a small smile and murmured, “Goodnight, Lillian.”

There was a hard, strange look in Lillian’s eye, but it passed in a moment as she nodded, swallowed and responded, “Night, Eliza.”

Suddenly feeling like she was suffocating slightly under Lillian’s gaze, Eliza quickly turned and shoved her way out of the car, slamming the door shut and immediately heading straight for her own car without looking back.

“Hey, Eliza,” Lillian called out jumping out of the driver’s side door and standing. Eliza paused for a moment before she set a light expression on her face and turned curiously. Lillian bit her cheek for a long moment, almost as if she were debating something with herself before she finally murmured softly, “Happy birthday.”

Eliza’s eyes widened slightly as she watched Lillian quickly ducked back into her car without glancing back at Eliza. As Eliza stood a bit stunned, Lillian started her car and drove away, leaving Eliza alone in the parking lot as her mind reeled. She hadn’t told anyone it was today. In fact, she had gone out of her way to make sure no one found out. So how did Lillian-

A short memory flashed through her head. Two years ago everyone who worked under Dr. Samson had gone out for her birthday. It was the only summer all of grad school that Eliza had spent on research instead of going home. Lillian had sat quietly in the corner, ignoring Eliza the whole night, and she had let it get under her skin slightly. Why come if she was going to continue to be a bitch?

Eliza shook her head of the memory as she finally snapped herself into motion and pulled out the keys to her car as she shakily unlocked it. Staudhammer had probably told the team it was her birthday without her knowing, she told herself, as she scoffed. Lillian certainly wouldn’t remember the date from two years ago. As she sat in the car and stared at the steering wheel for a moment, Eliza nodded content at her solution and pulled on her seatbelt.

Another, hazier memory flashed through her mind from that night two years ago. Eliza had stumbled up to the bar to pay her tab just as Lillian was leaving. “Thanks for coming, Lillian,” Eliza had slurred, an edge apparent in her voice. Lillian had paused to consider her for a second before silently walking away. Eliza watched her exit the bar before turning to the bartender and asking to close out for the night; the bartender merely smiled at her and informed her someone had already covered her bill, and to have a happy birthday.

Eliza’s stomach churned as she started the engine.

The Manned Spacecraft Center was incessentally buzzing the mid-September day of the announcement, but for the first time in her almost nine months at NASA, the rumors encouraged Eliza rather than making her feel more miserable. In fact, it was the first time her and Lillian actively participated in the gossip going around with amusement. Everyone had placed a bet, and Lillian had slipped Eliza a five dollar bill inconspicuously so she could throw some into the pot as well.

The official Apollo program mission schedule was being released, along with the astronauts that would man the first flights of the program. The bets were kept simple: which Apollo mission would be the first one manned and which two men would have their teams chosen to be the first in space.

Eliza stared at her paper for a long time, considering the different options. She wasn’t sure whether to expect three or four unmanned missions. If they did four unmanned missions, they would risk not getting to the moon by the end of the decade, but she also knew safety meant more to Kranz than anything else. On top of that, there was the question of whether or not the crews from the previously planned Apollo missions would hold true or if they would be switched around for some reason because of the delays.

Finally Eliza sighed and just wrote down her gut instincts. _Apollo 7. Walter Schirra. Jeremiah Danvers._

Lillian glanced at Eliza’s slip before she turned it in and raised her eyebrows slightly. “You’re putting your money on Danvers?” she asked a bit skeptically, and Eliza grimaced.

“Call it intuition,” she answered cheekily, and Lillian scoffed and rolled her eyes.

“I doubt they’ll change any of the orders,” she argued, letting Eliza peek at her slip where she had written _Apollo 8, Walter Schirra,_ _James McDivitt_. Eliza bit her cheek and challenged Lillian with a wrinkle in her nose.

“You’ll see, Lil. My man Danvers will pull through,” she answered easily.

Lillian shook her head and murmured, “A man is nice to you once, and you waste my five dollars on him.”

With a small laugh, Eliza looked Lillian defiantly in the eye before submitting her slip into the pool as Lillian watched on with the ghost of a smirk on her lips.

It didn’t take long after for their team to be called down to Mission Control for the big announcement. Eliza easily grabbed onto Lillian’s arm as they shuffled their way through the crowd to obtain their usual position in the back of the room. 

“Alright everyone, we have a lot to get through, and this schedule is not going to be like any of the ones you’ve worked with before, so I need everyone to pay attention,” Kranz started, flipping through his papers in front of him as Eliza shot Lillian an amused look. “A more in-depth report will be sent out to each of the teams, but what you all need to know is that the Apollo program will continue under our approved sequence, that is as follows: A missions testing uncrewed CSMs, B missions testing uncrewed LMs, C missions testing crewed CSMs, D missions testing crewed CSMs and LMs, E missions testing high orbit, F missions testing lunar orbit, and finally G missions with a crewed landing on the moon.

“I expect two missions for both the A and B missions,” Kranz continued, and Eliza grinded her teeth a bit. That would mean the first manned mission would be Apollo 8, and Eliza had already lost the bet. “If all goes well, we’ll only need one mission for C through F leading up to G. This sequence is strictly required for this program. We will not move on to the next mission type until the one before it has been successful. With Apollo 4 being our first A mission taking off in two months, the first B mission--Apollo 5--has been scheduled tentatively for the end of January.”

Eliza bristled at this. Apollo 5 would be the first true test of the LM descent engine then. LM-1 would be going up in four months, and it would have to be flawless when it did so. Failure on their part would push the whole program schedule back even further, and Eliza was still coping with the failure of the LTA systems test that she hadn’t even had a hand in.

As if sensing Eliza’s distress from the announcement, Lillian shifted slightly closer to her, just enough for their arm’s to brush slightly, but it was enough comfort to allow Eliza to steady herself and let out a long breath.

They had already worked through several problems with the engine while working on the LTA. Four months was plenty of time to finish getting LM-1 ready, she told herself.

“The order of crews for the manned missions will then remain the same, going in the order of Schirra, McDevitt, Collins, Stafford, Conrad, and finally Danvers,” Kranz then continued, and Eliza held her breath, knowing Lillian wouldn’t waste a moment in gloating.

“Oh, Eliza,” Lillian murmured a bit sarcastically, and Eliza bit her check to stop herself from smiling. “Seems like your intuition was a little off. One out of three though, that’s pretty good.”

“Shut it, Marshall,” Eliza shot back easily. “They haven’t gone to space yet.”

Glancing over at Lillian’s expression, Eliza fought to keep her face neutral as Lillian raised her eyebrows a bit in disbelief. “You can’t possibly believe your prediction could still be right,” she protested. “We’d have to bypass one of our unmanned tests, and then somehow, under some circumstance need the scheduled _sixth_ commander to fly the _second_ manned flight.”

With a shrug, Eliza argued, “It could happen.”

“I know you struggle with calculations, so let me help you out: that’s four men in between your guy and the position you want him in,” Lillian pushed, and Eliza gently elbowed her in the side for the jab. Lillian huffed out a small laugh, and when Eliza peeked over at her again, she was grinning widely and shaking her head a bit in disbelief.

“If you’re so confident, how about we make a bet, just the two of us,” Eliza offered defiantly, as Kranz continued to detail out other specifics of the sequencing.

Scoffing a bit, Lillian whispered, “With what? I already paid your entry into the original bet.”

“Okay, well, you’d be the only one really betting anything,” Eliza backtracked slightly, and Eliza heard Lillian huff out a laugh beside her before relenting.

“You know what,” she started, “you have no chance of winning anyways, so I’ll amuse you. What do you want if you win?”

“How rich are you again?” Eliza inquired with a curious look, and Lillian smirked.

“Rich,” she responded easily, to which Eliza nodded her head at dutifully then.

Humming slightly, Eliza then stated, “I could really use a new car. Mine could break down on me any day.”

“You want me to buy you a new car?” Lillian asked, a bit incredulous.

“When I win, yeah,” Eliza responded defiantly, as she tried not to laugh at Lillian’s expression.

“Now who’s turning everything into a competition,” Lillian muttered fondly.

Scrunching her nose slightly, Eliza grinned up at Lillian and asserted, “Guess you’re a bad influence on me.”

Lillian glanced over at her at this, pausing for a moment as she watched Eliza like she was considering something. Then finally shaking it off and turning back to Kranz, Lillian murmured just soft enough that Eliza could barely hear, “Guess I am.”

“I can’t believe they’re requiring us to be here this early, and they can’t even provide us with decent coffee,” Lillian lamented as she scooted onto the lab table beside Eliza and glared down at the cup in her hand.

The men on their team were sitting in similar fashion and moving around the room as they talked quietly, everyone coming to the silent mutual agreement that it was far too early to be speaking at a normal level. A TV was set up in the front of the room, the volume turned down for the time being. Staudhammer seemed as if he would doze off at his desk at any moment. Eliza smirked before rolling her eyes at the scene and turning her attention back to Lillian beside her.

“You’re here this early once a week anyway,” she pointed out, stifling a yawn as she pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on them.

Frowning, Lillian set her cup of coffee to the side, seemingly giving up hope on it. “Yes, but normally when I’m here at 6:00 AM, it’s just with you, and I don’t have to listen to Bill’s infuriating laugh across the room,” she grumbled, crossing her arms and staring despondently at the ceiling.

Eliza opened her mouth to respond and tease Lillian about enjoying her early morning company, but was cut off by someone turning the volume of the TV up.

“Good morning, America. I’m Walter Cronkite with CBS News bringing live updates this morning from the Kennedy Space Center Complex 39 in Merritt Island, Florida. Any minute now the historic Apollo 4 mission will be launching the first spacecraft from this site, setting the record for the largest rocket ever launched and officially kicking off the Apollo program.

“We are sitting three miles away from the launch site in the Vertical Assembly Building, waiting for the all clear for the launch. I wish you could all feel the energy in the air here. After the disaster of Apollo 1 earlier this year, all of NASA anxiously awaits to prove itself and the Apollo program. This mission is uncrewed and is only testing the Command Service Module, employing an ‘all-up’ testing technique for the first time in NASA’s history. This means that every stage of this rocket will be tested in this one go, instead of individually throughout many launches. The stakes are high, but officials at NASA are confident that mistakes are behind them, and this mission will be an all-around success.”

Eliza could feel her hands start to shake slightly as she stared listlessly at the TV as Cronkite continued his monologue informing the viewers of what exactly NASA was trying to prove today.

“If I worked anywhere on the CSM crew, I’d been shitting myself right now,” Lillian murmured with a bit of mirth. “They could have their second mistake--solidifying the end of the Apollo program--broadcasted live to the entire country right now.”

Eliza tried to let out a smile at that, but ended up just forcing a grimace on her lips. “They aren’t the only ones with something at stake here,” she reminded Lillian a bit worriedly. “LTA-10R is on there too.”

Scoffing, Lillian brushed it off, trying to come across as unperturbed, but Eliza knew her well enough at this point to know that she was at least a little nervous. “Our Test Article is just a glorified weight for this mission,” she countered distractedly. “It doesn’t have to do anything.”

“Which means it’ll be that much worse if it ruins the whole mission,” Eliza argued, and Lillian raised her eyebrows a bit.

Lillian paused for a moment, watching Eliza curiously, before she sighed and gently tugged one of Eliza’s hands from its position of holding her legs up, and Eliza stared up at her a bit confused as Lillian held her hand firmly and squeezed a bit. “We’re about to watch history, Worthington,” she stated. “Now’s not the time to be pessimistic again.”

Eliza finally relented a sigh and returned the tight grip on Lillian’s hand, and then turned her attention back to the TV.

“Alright folks, we have just received word that the all clear has been given for liftoff. Any moment now-”

Cronkite was cut off abruptly as a deafening blast sounded over the TV. Eliza sat up straighter, alerted, and the entire team seemed to be holding her breath. Eliza was clutching Lillian’s hand so tightly, she should have been worried about potentially hurting her had she not been staring at the screen completely terrified about what was happening. Eventually, however, Cronkite’s voice came yelling above the noise.

“Our building’s shaking! Oh, it’s absolutely terrific, look at that, the whole building’s shaking! Listen to that roar, and- Oh! There it goes, you can see it! You can see it disappearing into the clouds! Magnificent! Terrific!”

Eliza let out a relieved laugh at the scene, as a small selection of other men hollered in victory, but they all still stared at the screen, waiting for any additional information with bated breath. Lillian had at some point pulled herself closer to Eliza, so now their arms were intertwined as well as they sat and waited hopefully for the official word.

Several minutes passed, and the phone at Staudhammer’s desk rang. The whole room was so quiet, but they couldn’t hear the voice on the other side.

“Will do,” Staudhammer answered, after listening for a moment, and then hung up, turning to face the group of engineers watching him with rapt attention. Letting out a sigh he announced, “All stages of take off went perfectly. The CSM is currently in orbit.”

Everyone lept to their feet eagerly at the announcement, letting out a resounding round of cheers. Still clutching onto Lillian’s hand, Eliza turned to her and easily wrapped her other arm around Lillian, pulling her into a tight hug as she screamed victoriously. Lillian quickly dislodged her hand from Eliza’s to wrap both her arms around Eliza’s waist and spin her around slightly, to which Eliza let out a completely unbridled laugh at.

When they pulled away from each other, they both could feel it in the energy of the room and in the unspoken words between them. They were addicted to the rush of this success now, and neither of them would rest until they put a man on the moon. It was such a small victory, but it felt like such a high. After all their mistakes and missteps from the past year, they deserved this moment. And it would only go up from here. This was just the beginning.

The phone in the lab had been ringing nonstop all evening. Eliza wanted to inquire who it was, but every time Lillian picked up the receiver, she got frustrated in an instant and heatedly hung up without saying a word. It all came to a head when Lillian finally called the front office to instruct them to block all outside calls to their lab for the rest of the night. Eliza raised her eyebrows curiously, but Lillian pointedly ignored her stare as she flopped back down onto her seat and finally let out a long breath.

“Want to talk about it?” Eliza asked, still having no idea who was clearly trying to get in contact with Lillian. Most of the team had taken the days leading up to the holidays off, and most days it was only her and Lillian in the lab. Eliza definitely didn’t have anyone trying to get a hold of her, but someone seemed pretty desperate to speak to Lillian.

Finally Lillian shrugged and tried to brush it off. “Nothing. Just my parents,” she explained easily. When Eliza stared at her expectantly, she relented and continued, “I was supposed to be on a plane this afternoon, so I’m sure they’re just wondering why I wasn’t.”

Eliza bit her cheek and tried to keep the amusement out of her expression as she patiently asked, “Well, why weren’t you?” This was the first Eliza was hearing of Lillian spending the holidays at home.

“I have a Lunar Module to put into space,” Lillian shot back defiantly.

“You’ve been sketching designs for the Apollo 5 patch for the past two hours,” Eliza pointed out, crossing her arms smugly as Lillian’s face morphed from affronted to resigned.

Sighing Lillian sat back in her chair and crossed her arms dramatically to match Eliza, and Eliza bit back her comment about her looking like a petulant child. “They’re throwing me a party tonight, and I didn’t particularly want to go,” she finally grumbled, and Eliza snorted at the answer.

“Ah, yes, how dare they,” she joked, and Lillian gently tossed her pencil at her annoyed.

“It’s not the party,” Lillian defended. “It’s just- I know how they’re going to act at the party.”

Pursing her lips together and quirking her eyebrows slightly, Eliza tilted her head and inquired, “And how’s that?”

“Like they’re… selling me to the highest bidder,” she finally responded. “Like they’d let any man in the room have me if he offered the right business deal. The party’s just a front. It’s really just an auction, and I’m the most valuable item there.” Her voice drifted off a bit listlessly before Lillian cast her eyes downwards, and she didn’t notice the shadow that began to cover Eliza's expression.

“I thought they wanted you to marry Lionel,” she finally stated, the teasing that was present in her voice just a moment ago replaced by a cold edge.

Scoffing slightly, Lillian just shook her head. “Marriage doesn’t mean anything in my world. Marriage is an optional consideration if business is in the mix,” she lamented, and Eliza bristled, gritting her teeth together a bit. “Besides,” she continued, her voice lightening a bit, “ _clearly_ I’d rather spend my birthday with my best friend.”

Her eyes glanced up at Eliza a bit hesitantly, and Eliza felt her mind stop in its tracks and her breath catch as her anger was forgotten and Lillian’s statement caught up with her. It was Lillian’s birthday? Had she known that? And she considered them best friends? Eliza could feel her skin start burning slightly as she smiled a bit at the thought.

After a moment, she finally inquired with a brazen smirk across her lips, “Best friend, huh?”

Lillian’s eyes widened a bit as she looked stricken and backtracked. “Oh, wait, you thought I meant you?” she asked, and Eliza’s heart stopped for a moment, thinking she had completely misread the situation and already feeling an intense wave of embarrassment coming on. “I was talking to the Lunar Module,” Lillian finished seriously, but this time, Eliza could hear the sarcasm in it before Lillian broke out into a loud laugh at Eliza’s pale face.

Glaring at her, Eliza picked up Lillian’s pencil and threw it back at her, hitting her in the chest as Lillian continued to laugh at her. Eliza did her best to seem completely unamused by the joke, but she felt a smile crack at the corner of her lips eventually.

“Asshole,” Eliza muttered when Lillian had finally calmed down, to which Lillian responded with a quick wink.

Shaking her head, Eliza stood up then, gathering her coat and her bag and Lillian sent her a questioning look. “Well you can either spend your birthday evening with your best friend the Lunar Module, or you can let me buy you a beer,” she offered, and Lillian only considered it for a moment before she was following Eliza out the door.

Eliza drove them to a part of town Lillian didn’t recognize off hand, but she wasn’t paying very close attention either, rather warily watching the road and the engine stats and cringing every time the car made a groan that made Lillian feel certain it was about to implode.

“Maybe I do need to buy you a new car,” she muttered ten minutes into the drive, and Eliza laughed at the statement.

It wasn’t long then before they were parking on the side of the street in front of a small dive bar, and Eliza was leading Lillian inside confidentally. There weren’t many patrons in the bar, but the bartender smiled in recognition as Eliza walked in.

“Two lagers please. Thanks, Hector,” Eliza requested softly, and the man easily filled their order in a minute. “Is the deck open?” Eliza then asked as she took their drinks from Hector’s hands, and he let out a little laugh.

“You’re the only one who’d request to use it in the middle of December, but yeah kid, go on up if you want,” he informed her, and Eliza shot Lillian a triumphant smile as she handed her her beer.

Lillian took her glass easily and watched amused as Eliza led her to the opposite side of the bar and up some stairs. Sliding a door open at the top, she then walked outside onto a small deck where she immediately sat down her beer and started moving a table. Lillian observed her curiously, but finally understood what she was doing when she picked her beer back up, stood on the table, and then carefully climbed atop the low-sitting, sloped roof. As soon as she was seated, she shot Lillian an expectant look, and Lillian bit her cheek before following Eliza onto the roof.

They sat there for several minutes, mindlessly chatting, and downing their beers quickly to help fight the cold bite in the air. Lillian kept sending Eliza glances every so often that Eliza had no idea where to even begin interpreting, so instead, she pushed them to the back of her mind and just smirked in return.

“Do you have any plans for the holidays?” Lillian asked after a moment, and Eliza mulled the question over.

Finally she sighed and relented, “I haven’t really celebrated them much since my brothers left.” Then with a little laugh to herself, she sipped her beer and shook her head and continued, “Not for lack of trying. That first year… We all tried, but all my dad did was insult my career choice, and my mom wrapped gifts for my brothers that we had to stare at the entire week, so we just all silently agreed we would never do that again.”

She could feel the pitying gaze Lillian was sending her way, so instead of facing it, she downed the rest of her beer, sat the glass in the gutter, and then laid back on the roof and stared up at the stars. Lillian seemed to consider her for a moment, before she too finished off her beer and laid beside Eliza, only a few inches between their bodies.

“Did you see that article on the pulsing light?” Eliza finally asked after several long moments of silence, and Lillian hummed in confirmation. It was all the astronomy and physics community had been talking about in their editorials. Jocelyn Bell had discovered it: a light blinking at such a precise rate in the distant sky, it was more accurate at keeping time than atomic clocks.

“It’s a shame because you know Jocelyn Bell won’t get the credit for it,” Lillian finally commented a bit bitterly.

“Why shouldn’t she?” Eliza shot back easily. “She made the discovery.”

“Why _should_ she?” Lillian countered bluntly. “She’s a woman. The science community will never care enough about her or her career to make sure she’s probably credited.”

Eliza rolled her eyes slightly as she reached out to push Lillian on the shoulder. “You’re cynical.”

“I’m _right_ ,” Lillian argued defensively, and Eliza shook her head.

“Well, I hope you’re wrong,” she said defiantly. “The world’s changing, Lillian Marshall. Just you wait and see.” 

Lillian mulled over this for a few seconds, not wanting to argue with Eliza any further on the subject, so instead she decided to change course. “Did you see they named it Little Green Men?”

Eliza let out a small laugh. She too had been amused when she saw the light had been named after the possibility it was communication from other life forms in the universe. “Well it could be extraterrestrial life, who knows,” she argued lightly. 

Lillian pondered this for a moment before asking, “Do you think it is?”

“I think…” Eliza began before cutting off and chewing her cheek slightly. “When I was little, my family would take trips to the seaside,” she finally restarted.

Lillian glanced over at her curiously, assuredly wondering why the seeming change in subject, but knowing not to interrupt Eliza as she reminisced on her childhood, as it might scare her into stopping. These moments were rare enough as they were. 

“My brothers and I would spend all day sailing, and we’d lose track of the shore, but as it started to get dark, a pulsing light in the distance would show us the way,” she continued softly, stopping to swallow thickly as she stared up at the expanse of stars before her. “This sounds dumb, because I know we’re going to find a scientific explanation for it, but right now, I think it’s just a sign from my brothers trying to show me the way.”

Lillian remained silent as the seconds ticked past before she finally asked, “Do you feel lost?”

Eliza held her breath at the question, staring at the sky and trying to fight the tears in the corners of her eyes and fighting with herself at how to answer. She had always felt lost, even before her brothers died. Trying to figure out who she wanted to be and what she wanted to do. And now, here she was, a successful engineer at NASA. Fulfilling what she thought was her lifelong dreams. So why didn’t she feel the relief of being found? 

Finally, she turned her head, still unsure of what her answer would be, and found Lillian staring at her with rapt attention. Her breathing turned slightly more shallow as a single tear dropped from the edge of her eye, but she held Lillian’s intense gaze easily. Slowly, as if by an unspoken agreement, their fingers entangled themselves in each other, and in that moment, Eliza felt grounded in a peace and understanding she had never felt before in her life.

She swallowed and answered softly, “Not as much as I used to.”


	2. 1968

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> back again w some gay nasa milfs, enjoy!!
> 
> tw: r*chard n*xon

Lillian Marshall knew she was going to fall in love with Eliza Worthington the moment she laid eyes on her. Back before Lillian had ever considered joining the Apollo program. Back before her life consisted of Lunar Modules, incessant calculations, and one absolutely intoxicating woman. Back when she believed she could mold the world in her hands and was fueled entirely by spite and heartbreak.

Lillian had moved to MIT’s campus two weeks early, a perk she was sure her father bought her, but one she was grateful for nonetheless. Everyone in her household had been holding their breath in hopes of Lillian leaving as quickly as possible; the tension was unbearable since she had returned home from undergraduate and every other day seemed to inevitably end in some kind of explosive altercation between Lillian and her father. She left her home two hours after she had gotten the invitation for her early move in.

One night, late into her second week there, she was suddenly struck with the urge to sneak into the labs, hoping for some privacy before everyone else would be arriving for orientation. She had worked with Dr. Samson a few summers back and was hoping she could re-examine some of the experiments to start getting back into the swing of things. In the middle of digging through the files, the door to the lab had swung open, and two people had spilled in. Without thinking, Lillian ducked behind one of the lab tables.

She wasn’t sure why she hid. None of the university’s facilitators would risk reprimanding her and losing her father’s donations to the program. Maybe that was why. Maybe she just didn’t want to be everyone’s exception.

As she peeked around the side of the table she hid behind, her eyes landed on a tall stocky man she recognized from around the labs earlier in the week. He was a third year grad student; one of the professors’ prodigies. With him was a timid girl sporting a devilish smile. She let out a small laugh as she looked around the room in awe.

“This Dr. Samson’s lab,” the grad student introduced with pomp. “This is where you’ll be studying.” Lillian’s stomach churned as she realized this must be the other girl accepted into her grad program.

The girl didn’t say anything. Just walked around the lab with an approving look on her face and a slight upturn at the corner of her lips. Lillian found herself mesmerized by her and held her breath as she watched the girl walk around like she owned the place. She looked so effortlessly comfortable in a place that often went out of its way excluding her.

“Mr. Cannon, Ms. Worthington,” a voice boomed from the doorway, and both figures spun around in surprise. The voice wasn’t unkind, but it was commanding. “I’m afraid my lab is closed right now,” Dr. Samson then continued stepping into the room with a pointed look. Cannon seemed almost bashful at getting caught, but Worthington smiled at him sweetly and took one last longing glance at the lab.

Just before she turned to walk out of the room, her eyes landed deliberately onto Lillian, whose breath hitched as she froze. Worthington’s face gave nothing away before she winked at Lillian and walked out of the room.

Lillian stayed curled up behind the lab table for several more minutes after Dr. Samson closed the door behind the two other intruders and tried to get her heartrate back down.

_It’s always the blondes_ , she thought to herself bitterly.

MIT was supposed to be a clean slate away from women in labs who would inevitably break her heart and leave her empty. Lillian rubbed her face with her hands roughly before groaning. She had to put a stop to it before it started. She had enough to worry about with the grad program and a lot on the line. If she didn’t do well, she would end up right back in her father’s trap as Lionel Luthor’s arm candy.

Lillian decided she would ignore the girl and destroy any chance of the two becoming close. If there was anything Lillian had learned from being a Marshall, it was how to make people feel unwelcome.

Unfortunately for her, Eliza Worthington as she had come to find, took this as a challenge. She was persistent, Lillian would give her that. She spent far too much time in those four years trying to decide if Eliza was trying to usurp her or impress her.

Perhaps she should thank Eliza, Lillian finally thought regretfully. Had she not had an unspoken rivalry with the woman, she may not have received the marks she needed to secure this job on the Apollo program. Maybe they were both here because of each other, which seemed almost comically ironic to Lillian.

She put in all that time and effort to get rid of Eliza and escape Lionel, and now here she was, dangerously close to Eliza’s gravitational pull and just out of Lionel’s grasp once again.

“Ready for a long night?” Eliza sighed, as she flopped down onto the chair next to Lillian and pulled her from her thoughts. Lillian blinked tiredly, pulling her face back into its controlled expression careful not to give anything away about where her mind had been wandering.

“Watch it, Worthington,” Lillian whispered lowly, glancing conspiratorily around them. “Don’t announce to the entire room that we’re going to be bored and tired. Jimmy will make us play cards with him all night.”

Eliza snorted quietly before peeking over at the table of men from the LM’s Ascent Propulsion System engine already gathering around to play cards and pretend to be entertained for half of a day.

“Well, if it’s worth anything, I’d rather be here than at home. My landlord still hasn’t fixed my heater and this chair honestly might be more comfortable than my mattress,” Eliza lamented, and Lillian bit her tongue before she offered to buy Eliza a new everything. Betting a car was one thing; continuously throwing money at her was another.

“Team!” a loud voice boomed from across the room, and Lillian and Eliza both shot up in their chairs, eyes searching across the room for the unmistakable yell of their superior, Dr. Staudhammer. “Meeting, now,” he demanded, and the entire LM descent engine team jumped out of their chairs to follow their leader.

They were all led into a tight room, and Lillian immediately noticed Director Kranz and Lionel Luthor muttering quietly to each other while frowning on the other end of the room. Lillian bit her cheek; this wasn’t good.

“We suspect there’s been a fuel leak in the descent engine,” Kranz finally spoke, and Lillian’s stomach dropped. “Someone give me a solution because Apollo 5 goes up in twenty minutes, and I need an LM to test or we’ve wasted millions of dollars.”

The whole team was silent. Lillian felt Eliza nervously begin rocking on her feet beside her and instinctively, she reached out and brushed her hand against Eliza’s forearm to offer what little comfort she could right now. Kranz and Lionel seemed to glare their way through the whole group; eventually, Lionel’s eyes landed on Lillian, and she felt a shiver run through her.

“Don’t arm the engine until ignition,” Eliza suggested quietly, and everyone’s eyes turned towards her. Kranz’s mouth was set into a deep frown, clearly remembering his last interaction with Eliza after the explosion of LTA-5. Lillian fought the urge to step in front of Eliza protectively.

“And if we arm the ignition in orbit, and the whole vehicle goes up?” he questioned her, and Lillian wanted to scoff in annoyance.

Letting out a slow breath through her nose, Lillian channelled her Marshall instincts and stepped up slightly. “That’s why we’re doing the unmanned tests, right?” she questioned, her expression perfectly polite, but her smile was razor sharp.

Kranz considered her for a moment, before he eventually sighed, “Fine. Seeing as we have no other option, we’ll wait to arm the engine until in flight. You’re all dismissed.”

The group was quiet as they exited the meeting room, ridden with a newfound anxiety preceding Apollo 5 than they had ten minutes previous. Lillian made a point to shuffle out of the room as quickly as possible to avoid any interaction with Lionel. She hadn’t realized he would be there and hoped it meant he would for once not try to corner her into spending time with him.

“Thanks for backing me up in there,” Eliza murmured as they retreated to their table.

Lillian shot her a soft smile before reassuring her, “It was a good idea. Kranz just wants to find something wrong with you since he looks bad for publicly reprimanding you and being wrong last time.”

Eliza chewed on her lip for a moment until she eventually relented and smiled at Lillian gratefully.

The Apollo 5 launch went perfectly, allowing for a sigh of relief throughout most of the room. The descent engine team, however, still sat nervously on the edge of their seats, waiting for the moment their engine would be tested. Lillian could tell Eliza was extremely anxious as her eyes stayed trained on the large TV near them, as if she were anticipating an explosion at any minute; in an attempt to take her mind off of it for the time being, Lillian kept pulling Eliza into inane discussions.

It was almost two hours into the flight until the descent engine was ready to be tested. The tests to be executed were simple: two thirty-nine second burns. That was it. In the span of one minute and eighteen seconds, the LM descent engine team would know if they spent the past year preparing to be successful or monumentally useless.

“Starting descent engine burn,” a voice announced over the loudspeaker, and Eliza’s hand immediately reached for Lillian’s and squeezed. They stared at the screen, waiting to see the burn, and… 

Nothing.

Lillian turned to Eliza and furrowed her eyebrows. They both turned back to the TV and watched with frowns as nothing continued to happen.

Finally, the voice over the loudspeaker returned. “Houston, we seem to have a problem,” the voice said. “Our computer has aborted the burn.” Lillian’s skin began to feel prickly as she heard the words. The computer aborted? It was programmed to never do that unless-

Lillian gritted her teeth. “Those stupid cows forgot to tell the programmers that the engines would take longer to pressurize since we weren’t arming it right away,” she lamented, and Eliza looked over at her with wide eyes. “The program’s set up to abort if thrust isn’t detected after four seconds.”

“Is there any way to override the four second override?” they heard Kranz speak through the speakers this time, as if on cue, and both Lillian and Eliza groaned.

“No sir,” came the reply a moment later. “We can test the thrust manually, though.”

“Well at least they’ll test something,” Eliza muttered, crossing her arms, and Lillian snorted as she sat back in her seat. After a moment, she seemed to consider something carefully, before she added, “And I got to hear you call Kranz and Luthor ‘stupid cows’, so I guess the mission isn’t an entire loss after all.”

Everyone in the room turned to stare at them as Lillian couldn’t keep in her loud snort of laughter.

The two manual thrust tests went off without a hitch. Lillian and Eliza found various and increasingly ridiculous ways to keep each other awake throughout the whole rest of the mission. Many of the team members began dozing off during the eleven hours they were all stuck together, but both women were determined to stay awake.

At 4 AM, control over both the ascent and descent stages were terminated, completing all tests for Apollo 5. Everyone was finally given permission to return home, and Lillian and Eliza wasted no time gathering all of their things and speeding towards the parking lot.

“I think I could fall asleep on pavement right now,” Eliza commented as they exited the building into the hazy, dimly lit parking lot. They both parked near each other when they arrived that evening, so they began to head towards their cars together.

“Promise me you won’t fall asleep at the wheel, Worthington,” Lillian warned with an eyebrow raised, and Eliza rolled her eyes.

Shaking her head, she promised, “I’ll be fine, Lil.”

They arrived at Eliza’s car first, and Lillian nodded a goodbye at her, before continuing her trek towards her own car. She was halfway there when she heard Eliza’s car engine make a horrible screeching sound before shutting off. Whirling around, Lillian watched as Eliza hopped out of the car, obviously disgruntled and observed the smoke obviously coming from the engine.

“Fuck! Stupid piece of shit,” Eliza gritted out, kicking her tire slightly. Lillian paused for a moment before sighing and making her way over to Eliza.

“Let me look,” Lillian murmured, coming up on Eliza’s side and surprising her. Without waiting for permission, she started to prop the hood open and rummage through the engine. She felt Eliza’s presence at her side a few moments later, watching her curiously.

“Okay, I can fix it,” Lillian announced and Eliza raised her eyebrows slightly.

“You fix cars?” she inquired, a bit caught off guard.

Holding up her finger to correct her, Lillian shook her head and responded, “No. But I can fix your car.”

“I don’t know if I want you to fix my car if you don’t know how to fix cars,” Eliza then pointed out, but there was a teasing edge to her voice.

Lillian huffed and bit back her smirk at Eliza’s goading. Shooting her a pointed look, she levelled, “You could send it to the repair shop and pay hundreds of dollars if you want.”

Sighing, Eliza looked longingly at her engine that was still smoking slightly and relented. “Fine. It’s not like you can mess it up more than it is already,” she observed, and Lillian rolled her eyes.

Closing the hood again, Lillian turned to Eliza expectantly and motioned towards her own car. “Come on,” she instructed, her exhaustion beginning to slip into her voice.

“What?” Eliza questioned, furrowing her eyebrows.

“I can’t fix it now. My tools are back home, and frankly, I’m too tired to be messing with it today. I’ll fix it tomorrow,” she promised, before turning and walking to her care without waiting on Eliza. “I’ll take you home!” she then called out, sensing that Eliza was still apprehensive about following her.

Eliza must have finally realized Lillian’s offer was her only option, and so a few moments after Lillian was in the driver’s seat, the passenger door opened and Eliza spilled in.

“Thank you,” she murmured after a moment. “You really don’t have to do this for me.”

“I haven’t gotten to the part in the best friends manual where one leaves the other stranded at their place of employment with no way to get home,” Lillian then commented easily before she felt a soft punch in her arm.

“I was referring to you fixing my car,” Eliza shot back.

“I’m surprised you can’t fix it yourself,” Lillian prodded her, deflecting Eliza’s gratitude. “You grew up on a farm and got your undergrad in mechanical engineering. Shouldn’t this be your thing?”

Scoffing, Eliza shook her head before staring straight out the window. “I begged my brothers to teach me about our equipment, but my father was always furious with them if I tried. It wasn’t ladylike, he insisted. He just couldn’t have it.”

“And that man then let you go to school for engineering?” Lillian inquired, almost astounded as she glanced over at her passanger.

Shrugging it off, Eliza shook her head. “No. I convinced him to let me go to school for teaching,” she explained. “And then forgot to mention I changed my major for four years.”

Lillian’s eyes widened and she almost laughed with glee. “Eliza Worthington led a double life?” she mused in wonder. “Who would have thought.”

Rolling her eyes, Eliza smirked and quipped, “There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Marshall.”

The word seared right into Lillian’s chest and she had to tighten her grip on her steering wheel to keep herself from responding with the first thought that popped into her head. “Which way to your place?” she asked instead, hoping Eliza wouldn’t notice the light flush on her cheeks, and they spent the rest of the car ride in relative silence as Eliza directed her towards her tiny rundown apartment.

When Lillian pulled alongside the road of Eliza’s current place of residence, they both sat quietly, staring at it for a moment. Lillian could practically feel Eliza’s embarrassment rolling off of her, but instead of comforting her, she sat stunned at the state of the place Eliza inhabited.

It was falling apart. The roof was coming undone, the door didn’t look like it could lock properly, one of the windows was broken and replaced with cardboard and duct tape.

“This is your place?” Lillian inquired, unable to stop the incredulous tone from slipping into her voice. Her wide eyes glanced over to Eliza who was ducking her head slightly.

“I was hoping I’d be able to save up enough this past year to move somewhere nicer, but all one bedroom apartments available in the city still seem to be out of my price range, so I guess I’m renewing this lease,” she grumbled ashamed and unsatisfied as she stared at her dreary estate.

“Move in with me.” The words slipped out of Lillian’s mouth before she could rationally think them over, and she seemed to freeze as she realized what she said. Eliza turned to stare at her a bit warily.

Taking her in for a beat, Eliza then shook her head. “I couldn’t impose on you,” she insisted, biting her cheek.

Despite the voice in her head that was screaming the numerous ways inviting Eliza Worthington to come live with her would end in disaster, Lillian found herself doubling down. “You wouldn’t be,” she pressed. “My place is too big for just me. And I have a spare bedroom.”

Glancing hesitantly towards her place and then back at Lillian, Eliza began to relent. “You’re sure?” she questioned, not wanting to get her hopes up, and Lillian scoffed.

“Eliza, I can see three easy entry points into your house for a burglar or god forbid what else just from this view. I’m not letting you sleep another night here,” she stated firmly. “Go grab what you need for the night,” she then instructed, and Eliza didn’t need any more prodding.

Jumping out of the car, Lillian watched Eliza bound away into the house, a relieved smile on her face. As soon as she disappeared behind her door, Lillian sank deeper into her seat and ran her hands across her face. What had she gotten herself into? She was barely keeping it together seeing Eliza at work each day and being her friend. Being her roommate?

Lillian knew just how quickly feelings could turn complicated. She may have just single handedly set herself oncourse to ruin the only friendship she had ever maintained for longer than a few months.

When she caught movement back out of the corner of her eye, Lillian looked up to find Eliza grinning with a bag in her hand and a pep in her step. She nearly skipped back out to the car and slid in effortlessly.

Before Lillian could react, Eliza was crossing over the center console and pulling her into a tight hug. They stayed together like that for several long moments, and eventually, Lillian heard Eliza sniff. Pulling back, she found the woman with tear-stained cheeks, fighting through her tears with a smile.

“Thank you,” Eliza finally murmured, her hands taking Lillian’s and squeezing them tightly. “Thank you for being my friend and giving me a safe place to land. I really can’t express how grateful I’ve been to have you in my life for the past year.” And then she lifted Lillian’s hand to her lips and kissed her fingers softly.

The sensation flew through Lillian with a _zing_. Lillian’s heartrate increased exponentially as she tried to keep her wits about her and come up with a coherent response. A moment passed before she realized she had ceased breathing and shook her head slightly, coming out of a daze. Her first instinct was to throw out a sarcastic quip at Eliza’s gratitude, but the sincerity in Eliza’s eyes stopped her.

Instead, she pressed her lips shut and executed the only acceptable response her mind seemed to come up with. Shakily, she lifted Eliza’s hand, still held in hers, up to her own lips and kissed her knuckles gently, her whole body feeling ablaze as her eyes never left Eliza’s, who was watching her carefully.

The air in the car felt thick, and Lillian almost felt as if she were suffocating.

How silly, she thought to herself after a moment; Eliza finally pulled her hands out of Lillian’s and went to situate her bag at her feet. 

How silly, she thought again, her stomach sinking. She had spent the past year strategizing on how to become close with Eliza without falling past the point of return and never did it occur to her that she already had. She was already at the mercy of her feelings--her big, undeniable, and terrifying feelings--for the woman sitting across from her, the woman she just invited to live with her, and now she had to continue on like nothing had changed.

Blinking and clearing her throat, Lillian numbly turned forward in her seat and put the car in drive, her jaw clenched as she tried to put her ill-timed revelation to rest.

Lillian was in her bathroom, preparing for her night out by carefully pinning up her hair, when she saw a flash behind her in the mirror. Without turning around, she knew it was Eliza flopping onto her bed to talk to her while she got ready. It was almost terrifying how little time it took Lillian to get used to such gestures from her roommate of two months.

In some ways, living with Eliza was exactly as hard as she expected it to be. Especially when Eliza had a habit of sprawling over Lillian’s bed and cuddling close to her when they sat to watch TV in the evenings.

But in a lot of ways, living with Eliza felt as natural as walking. They just synced; they could read each other’s emotions without saying a word. If Lillian was having a rough day, she would come out of her room and notice all the chores she had been putting off had been completed. If Eliza woke up late, Lillian had breakfast and coffee ready to hand to her as they walked out the door. Lillian couldn’t remember ever feeling so at ease with anyone in her life, and the feeling terrified her.

“Have you looked over Bill’s report at all?” Eliza called out, and Lillian could hear her rustling paper behind her.

Twisting around and quirking her eyebrow, Lillian pointed out, “It’s a Friday evening, Liz.” Turning back towards the mirror and leaning in, she couldn’t help but tease her friend. “Some of us have lives outside the lab.”

This comment earned her a scoff and she was sure an eyeroll too as Eliza sat up a bit to watch Lillian more carefully. “You should read it tomorrow if you get a chance,” Eliza continued, crossing her legs as she scanned the page. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to pinpoint what exactly happened before the Apollo 5 launch, but maybe you’ll catch something I didn’t.”

Lillian smiled fondly to herself, her chest warming as she was once again reminded how much Eliza valued her opinion. Then a moment later, she was sobered into a frown as the image of Eliza curled up on the couch all night by herself left a sour taste in her mouth.

“Do you want to go with me tonight?” she asked impulsively, whirling around with an expectant gaze.

Eliza looked up at her and blinked owlishly.

“I’m sure I have an outfit for you to borrow, and there’ll be so many people there, no one will question it,” Lillian continued pressing further, but Eliza just continued to look at her like she had three heads.

“You want me to go to your fancy dinner party?” she eventually questioned skeptically as she frowned.

Shaking her head slightly, Lillian reassured her, “It’s not my party. It’s just some fundraiser for a senator running for re-election this fall.” Her words, however, did nothing to sway Eliza’s visible discomfort. “Lots of people will be there and we'll blend in. My father just asked me to go, and after my birthday incident, I couldn’t say no.”

Offering her a soft smile, Eliza chewed on her cheek before finally admitting, “I would prefer not to go. I don’t wish to find out what people would say if I arrived on your arm.”

Lillian’s heart skipped a beat and her cheeks were immediately flushed red. Did Eliza think she was asking her to be her date? _Was_ she asking Eliza to be her date?

“I know I’m your best friend and all,” Eliza continued, obviously not noticing Lillian in the middle of a panic, “but I also know how people would gossip if they were to find out the Marshall heir let a farm girl nobody into her close circle of friends. It’s not really my scene to cause a stir.”

Blinking, Lillian’s heartrate slowly returned to normal as she took a deep breath. “That’s fine,” she then replied, stepping out of the bathroom and going to search for her purse. She hoped her voice didn’t sound too clipped or disappointed as she felt Eliza’s eyes following her around the room. “Just wanted to offer,” she finally reasoned, shooting Eliza a soft smile, to which she returned hesitantly.

“Lillian?” Eliza finally inquired after a moment. Lillian looked up at her with wide eyes, holding her breath at Eliza’s pensive tone. “Do _you_ want to go tonight?”

Scoffing and averting her eyes, Lillian deflected, “When do I ever want to go to these things?”

“You shouldn’t have to,” Eliza then stated simply, and Lillian looked up at her in surprise. “I know he’s your father, but I think sometimes you forget you're his daughter, not his employee.”

Staring blankly at her friend, Lillian’s mouth gaped open slightly, fighting to find something to say. Her body began to buzz as she processed the words over and over again in her head. “I- This is just a favor to him,” she finally stuttered, trying to justify herself. “An apology for missing my birthday party.”

“But you didn’t want to go to your birthday party either,” Eliza pointed out with her eyebrow raised. “As far as I’m concerned, you did the right thing three months ago. You don’t owe your time to anyone who makes you feel uncomfortable, even your father.”

Lillian pressed her lips together as she tried to breathe slowly through her nose. No one had stuck up for her like this before; no one had ever cared enough to try. Taking a shaky breath, she nodded, grateful Eliza’s words. She wouldn’t be able to act on them; she would be too afraid of her father’s retaliation. But… it was nice. To have someone acknowledge her desires and her worth.

With a thick voice, she finally murmured, “Thank you, Eliza.” Her friend stared up at her sympathetically. “I should get going,” she then continued a moment later, and Eliza sighed and conceded with a short nod. 

Lillian left the apartment quickly. She tried not to be obvious about avoiding Eliza’s eye contact before she left, but she was sure Eliza had picked up on it. Walking briskly to her car in the driveway outside, she tried to push the conversation out of her mind so she could mentally prepared for the taxing evening to come, but she found she couldn’t quite pull Eliza’s look of pure sincerity when she tried to speak up for her out of her mind completely.

When she swung into her driver’s seat and slammed the door shut behind her, she didn’t make a move to put her key into the ignition. Instead, she stared straight ahead out into the dark street in front of her for several minutes.

Why was she going to this pointless fundraiser that no one would remember seeing her at anyway? And why did it matter to this senator whether her father made a second-hand showing or not? While the gesture was nice, the senator almost certainly cared more about her father’s money than her.

If Lillian went, she already knew how the evening would pan out. She would stand stilted and awkward to the side for the first thirty minutes before inevitably one of her old quick and flippant romances would find her and inquire how she was. She would then be subjected to hearing an hour's worth about her exes kids and how much she now loved her incredibly rich and successful husband. This would eventually lead into being led into the men’s circles and having to dodge advances from every eligible bachelor in the room (and some non-eligible ones). When she turned them all down, the rumors would be revived about her being promised to Lionel Luthor. At that point, she would get fed up and leave.

Gritting her teeth, she pushed out of her car door and walked back up the path to her front door.

Eliza looked up in surprise when she noticed the door open. She was now wrapped in a blanket and attempting to turn on the TV in the living room. When her eyes met Lillian’s, Lillian knew she didn’t have to say anything. Eliza already knew why she was walking back through those doors.

Feeling the need to give some kind of explanation, however, Lillian finally stated, “I’m so curious about Bill’s report now; I couldn’t leave without reading it.”

Biting her cheek, Eliza smiled conspiratorially and nodded at her. “I’ll go get it,” she replied enthusiastically, playing along with the role Lillian provided her.

Sighing, Lillian walked straight into her bedroom as Eliza rummaged through her own. She grabbed the first set of sleepwear she could find and walked into her bathroom to undo all the hard work she had just spent the last hour on.

When she reemerged from the bathroom, face clean, hair down, and donning the sleepwear, Eliza was already waiting eagerly for her on the bed. Gingerly, Lillian padded over and slipped onto the bed, scooting closer to Eliza so she could look at the report in her hands.

“So the three things Bill narrowed it down to were a reed-switch failure, a pilot-valve leakage or an electrical circuit failure,” Eliza began flipping through the pages and eventually handing Lillian the report when she got to the section she was looking for. “I think our main issue from here is it could have been any combination of these things. So how do we fix what we don’t know?”

Lillian chewed on her lip as she read through part of the report before humming. “Instinctively, I think it was a reed-switch failure,” she finally stated, glancing up at Eliza, who looked as if she were hanging on to her every word. Ignoring the heat rising on her neck as she realized exactly how close they were now sitting, Lillian cleared her throat and gestured back down towards the paper in her hands. “I mean, how many times has that thing given us a false indication. Sometimes it feels like getting rid of the reed-switch would solve half of the issues on all tests.”

“True,” Eliza mused thoughtfully, gently tugging the report from Lillian’s hands and frowning as she flipped through more pages. “Though given the program’s luck in the past year, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was leakage or circuit failure.”

Scoffing gently, Lillian nudged Eliza with raised eyebrows. “We don’t base a lunar landing on luck though,” she stated pointedly, and Eliza rolled her eyes teasingly.

“All I’m saying is the chances of it being everything wrong instead of just a false signal are much more in our realm of experience at the Manned Spacecraft Center,” she noted with a smirk, and unable to help herself, Lillian let out a quiet laugh.

They stayed up a few more hours, pouring over the report and writing notes of suggestions they knew would probably be ignored unless the boys got desperate for ideas. But Lillian found herself enjoying the evening, every moment becoming more and more relieved she decided to ditch the benefit. Bouncing ideas off of Eliza and eventually allowing their pseudo work session to dissolve into an endless discussion about their lives, this was a far better use of her time, Lillian thought decidedly.

“Okay, age you knew you wanted to be an engineer,” Eliza prompted. They were lying on the bed now, staring up at the ceiling and Eliza was so close to her, Lillian could feel the ghost of her touch all along the left side of her body.

“Fourteen,” Lillian answered decidedly. “It was the summer my parents sent me to our cape house while they traveled to India. I had always been set on following my father’s footsteps and taking over the family legacy before then, but that summer I found an old shed on the estate with this beautiful car that no longer ran. The next day I was hauling all the books I could find in our library that even mentioned engines, and I was teaching myself how to fix the old car. From then on out, I knew I was hooked. Building, tinkering, engineering: that was my true calling.”

As she finished, she glanced over at Eliza who was watching her raptly. Her breath seemed to catch in her throat as they held eyes for a long moment, and eventually, Lillian broke the moment and murmured, “And you?”

Eliza blinked as if she were confused by the question, but a moment later, it caught up to her. “Oh, um, I think I was eight. Tommy was sick and my father had gone to town to fetch more seed. David came in from lunch and complained about how hard it was to catch and hold onto our calves by himself to tag them. By the end of the day, I had a working hook prototype for him, so he could hook their leg and fasten them to the fence for a short time to do the job.

“Almost every farm back home uses one now,” she continued with an edge to her voice, as she gritted her teeth. “I didn’t find out until years later that my father had told every farmer he sold one to that it was my brother’s invention. Until I had learned that, my drive to be an engineer was just pure excitement; after that however… I would be lying to say I wasn’t a little fueled by spite.”

Lillian turned to stare at Eliza with an unreadable expression; when the woman in question finally noticed, she furrowed her eyebrows and demanded, “What?”

“Nothing,” Lillian responded easily. “It’s just, you being fueled by spite? I don’t think I’ve ever related to you more.”

Eliza studied her for a beat before her facade cracked and she let out a loud brust of air and began giggling. Lillian, almost delirious with exhaustion, joined her as they both rolled closer to each other as they curled up with laughter.

When they finally began to sober up, they were practically on top of each other, and Eliza was smiling lazily at her as her eyelids began to droop. Lillian was thankful she was already half asleep so she wouldn’t notice how seemingly deafening her heartrate was.

Clearing her throat and shifting away slightly, Lillian mumbled a vague excuse about needing to use the bathroom before slipping off the bed and stumbling into her en suite. She sat in there for several minutes, eventually splashing cool water on her face to get her to snap out of it. She had given herself boundaries with Eliza, and she was proving increasingly shit at keeping to them.

Eventually, with a long breath, Lillian clenched her eyes shut and braved to venture back into her room.

The sight that found her melted her heart. The long forgotten report was scattered around the bed with Eliza curled up in the middle, sound asleep.

The right thing to do, Lillian told herself, was to wake Eliza up so she could return to her own room. But... Her thoughts started contorting themselves. She knew Eliza’s mattress was horrible and probably ruining her back, and her friend deserved some peaceful, comfortable sleep for once. And yes, it would be a small infraction on Lillian’s so-called boundaries, but friends platonically shared a bed all the time, right? Especially when it would benefit a friend in need.

And okay, Lillian wasn’t exactly appalled at the idea of falling asleep and knowing Eliza would be right beside her, but she would feel that way about her best friend whether there were other feelings involved or not.

So instead of forcing her tired mind to endure any more of an internal battle, Lillian quietly swept around the room to shut off all the lights and curled into her bed with Eliza. Just before she slipped into sleep, her mind flashed to how her night could have gone and she smiled satisfied. Father be damned, she thought smugly.

Her father called the next morning.

“I spoke with Representative Bush this morning,” his voice gruffed over the receiver. “He said he didn’t see you last night.”

“I never got the chance to greet him,” Lillian lied easily, her voice evening. “He was preoccupied most of the night; it was a large fundraiser for someone running unopposed,” she then added. Her father was silent for a long moment before he sighed.

“You know George,” he offered flatly. “I think he’s hoping Nixon will choose him as VP.” Lillian gritted her teeth. Her father was always playing games she never quite caught up to. Of course he wanted her to go to the dinner last night; there was the potential to get in the pocket of a future president.

“Well Agnew’s going to give him a run for it,” Lillian finally countered, and her father remained quiet on the other end of the line for several minutes. Lillian wasn’t surprised when she eventually heard the phone click without a single murmur of goodbye.

As the world seemed to be changing quickly around them throughout the spring, the Manned Spacecraft Center remained as constant as ever. Lillian often wondered how the engineers surrounding her seemed so calm all the time, as if nothing in the world bothered them.

They were, of course, white men, she constantly reminded herself. They often didn’t concern themselves with things outside of NASA’s sphere of influence. They were there to land a man on the moon; what did it matter what was happening on Earth?

The thing was, Lillian wanted to argue to the oblivious men, it _did_ matter. It mattered that Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated, and that the students at Columbia started an international movement to protest the war, and that Bobby Kennedy had been shot in his hotel in California… They were here to make history, she thought bitterly. And history didn’t exist without context.

The world felt surreal, like it was split into two realities. One where everything was falling apart, and one where everything remained untouched. Every morning she woke and wondered for a second if that would be the day the Manned Spacecraft Center would catch up to the world around it and endure some new horrible tragedy or life-altering movement; every morning Lillian walked into work and endured the same mind numbing calculations with no end in sight.

She had complained about it to Eliza a few nights previous. She wasn’t sure how she would have made it through the past months without Eliza living with her. Complicated feelings be damned; she was forever grateful to have someone at home who understood. When the news broke about RFK, Lillian didn’t have to explain the immediate doom and desperation she felt in the pit of her stomach. Eliza felt it too. She had immediately reached out and squeezed her hand as her eyes filled up with tears. Hubert Humphrey would go up against Richard Nixon later that year in the presidential election, and it didn’t matter which won; neither would end the war.

“How is this country so set on breaking boundaries and sending a man to the moon, and yet refusing to move away from the past?” Lillian lamented, an edge to her voice a few nights previous. Her voice wasn’t slurring, which was almost impressive given the amount of alcohol she and Eliza had polished off in the two hours leading up to her declaration. They were lying on their backs on the floor of their living room, staring up at the ceiling, and Lillian’s shoulder was brushing Eliza’s every so slightly. “This country doesn’t serve anyone who dares defy the status quo,” she continued, tears burning at her eyes. “We’ve determined the most valuable members of society, and they are rich, white men who are brainwashed by war propaganda,” she pushed, her voice becoming harsher. “There’s no justice for any of the movements in this country. Our politicians just slap a bandaid on them or ignore them.”

She hadn’t noticed in her speech that Eliza had rolled onto her side and was now staring at her intensely. When Lillian’s eyes met hers, her breath caught in her throat.

“You know, you’re not the person I thought you’d be at all,” Eliza murmured after a moment, her fingers finding Lillian’s and interlocking them. “How did the heir to the Marshall dynasty get to be so outspoken?” she asked after a moment, her voice quiet, but the smirk on her mouth teasing Lillian.

Letting out a small scoff, she responded easily, “Brainwashing doesn’t work when you’re born different.”

Eliza narrowed her eyebrows a bit at this comment, and Lillian felt her face flush as her comment caught up to her. She had, of course, been speaking to her attraction toward women. An attraction Eliza was not privy to.

Lillian held Eliza’s eye contact for a long moment, and she considered telling her. Not everything. Just that one simple fact she had been hiding for so many years.

_I’m a lesbian._

The words echoed in her mind and made her skin feel clammy. She could almost feel the words at the edge of her lips, and yet she held them back. What if she told her and it changed everything? What if it ruined everything?

Lillian swallowed thickly. She couldn’t remember it ever being like this before. All those women she had crossed paths with and she never had to do this. Never had to formally tell them and wait anxiously for the response. They acted; many times, they hardly ever talked in the first place. So what made Eliza different? What stopped Lillian from testing the waters and just leaning forward slightly and tasting her lips like she had dreamed about every day since she winked at her in Dr. Samson’s lab all those years ago?

“Lillian?” Eliza murmured with a frown, clearly concerned over her friend’s state of distress.

Lillian blinked, slowly sobering up as she realized how lost her thoughts had gotten. The obvious answer to her question was the same reason Eliza was staring at her innocently. Eliza was straight; Lillian was just the fool who liked to dream of a reality otherwise.

Clearing her throat, Lillian finally shook her head and responded, “I just meant, my father always wanted a son. Being an only daughter changed the way my life may have panned out otherwise.” It was a weak reasoning, she knew it and by the look in Eliza’s eyes, she seemed to as well. But if Eliza wanted to question it, she thankfully didn’t.

Lillian promised herself since that night she would be more careful around a drink and Eliza. She couldn’t risk losing the only thing keeping her sane.

“Hey!” Eliza greeted chipperly, dropping a large packet of papers onto the table in front of Lillian with a thud. Biting back a groan, Lillian raised her eyebrows at her friend. “Guess what,” Eliza then continued, leaning in and whispering conspiratorially.

Sighing and picking up the folder that now lay in front of her, Lillian began to sort through the papers she would have to organize and eventually calculate that day. Distractedly, she answered Eliza’s probe with a short “What?”

“Apparently, Kranz decided that Apollo 5 went so well that we don’t need to test the LM again in an unmanned mission,” she informed Lillian. 

Freezing, Lillian frowned; she could almost feel Eliza’s expectant gaze watching her every move, waiting for some kind of reaction. Her immediate response was relief; all the LM teams seemed to be falling further behind schedule by the day and getting rid of their second unmanned test would give them more time to prepare while the rest of the program focused on the first manned test-

Her thoughts cut off as she suddenly realized why Eliza seemed so chipper about the news. She had said Apollo 7 would be the first manned mission to go up, and it seemed she would be right.

When she looked up, Eliza looked almost beside herself gloating. Lillian rolled her eyes and inquired, "Why are you looking so smug? Apollo 7 will be the first manned, but Danvers is still slated last in line to go to space."

"My bet's more correct than yours now,” Eliza reported dutifully, biting her cheek.

Leveling with her, Lillian reiterated, "You only get the car if Danvers goes on 8, Worthington."

"Okay, okay,” Eliza conceded with a small laugh and a knowing smirk. “We'll just see what happens then, won't we?"

Lillian’s stomach churned and something in her knew in that moment she would inevitably be purchasing Eliza a car.

“Alright team,” Staudhammer then drew their attention back up to the front of the room for their weekly meeting. “As some of you may have heard, we will no longer be working on LM-2 as its originally scheduled mission Apollo 7 will no longer be an unmanned test. We now have to set our sights for Apollo 8 at the end of this year. The full spacecraft will be going up to test rendezvous and docking. I know we’re a little behind schedule right now, but I expect you all to put your full effort into safely meeting our goal by the end of the year.

“To prepare for this upcoming flight, we’ve had LTA-5D returned to us today, completely refurbished from its accident a year ago. Let’s make sure it doesn’t blow up again, shall we?” he inquired, his eyes glancing up directly at Eliza. Lillian’s skin bristled as she clenched her jaw and fought from keeping herself from reprimanding all of the men in the room for _still_ discrediting Eliza when they all knew she had nothing to do with that accident. If she didn’t know Eliza would be incredibly uncomfortable by her doing so, she would have spoken up.

Instead, she felt Eliza’s soft hand reach out and squeeze her forearm gently for support. One glance over at her friend, and Lillian was almost impressed by how impassive Eliza looked about the whole thing. She almost believed Eliza truly didn’t care at all.

Looking up at her pointedly however, Lillian realized with a start Eliza really wasn’t bothered by the jab. Rather, she was reaching out to calm Lillian down. All of the air deflated out of her as quick as it came in.

“Okay, that’s all I have for you today. Our first MDC test for LTA-5D is next month. LM-3 is arriving in the next two weeks. Let’s start preparing to send some men to the moon,” Staudhammer finally finished, clapping his hands together.

The men in the room began to disperse to their respective lab areas, and Lillian felt infinitely jealous of them. Being back on calculations after everything her and Eliza had contributed to the team felt like a punch in the gut.

“Come on,” Eliza encouraged her, as if she could sense Lillian’s disappointment through her placid face. “It’s Friday. I’ll take you out for a drink as soon as we finish all of these,” she promised, in hopes to encourage her friend.

Finally with a sigh, Lillian relented a small smile and turned to watch as Eliza began to divide the papers from the folder out between them.

“Danvers! Worthington!”

The call from across the room startled both of the women who had their heads ducked at their desk, quietly arguing who would get to pick the TV show they would watch that evening as they chipped away at their paperwork. Sitting up alert, both women blinked in surprise, finding Staudhammer standing at the entrance of the otherwise empty lab.

“LM-3 just got delivered and the rest of the team is preparing for the MDC test on LTA-5D tomorrow. Go do some preliminary checks,” he instructed gruffly, before he turned on his heel and stalked out of the room without waiting on a response.

Eliza and Lillian stared after him in a bit of shock, before Eliza let out a loud laugh of joy and quickly began to pack up her papers. As soon as Lillian’s mind caught up to what happened, she scrambled to follow Eliza’s lead, shoving her papers together in a nonsensical order. Soon both women were practically running from the room towards the hangar with the coveted Lunar Module. It felt like they had been banned from actually working with the descent engine for months; the chance to look over the new LM before anyone else in their group felt like a high.

They both attempted to compose themselves before they stepped thorugh the hangar, in case other teams would be within the walls. It only took a few steps in for them both to realize they were alone.

“Finally,” Lillian breathed out, feeling the life and passion begin to zip back through her veins. The past few months had been testing her, but this? Just being able to get her hands dirty again for one afternoon would hold her over for at least another few months.

“Let’s check the solenoid valve first?” Eliza suggested, her eyes never tearing away from the LM.

Lillian hummed in agreement, walking around the backside of the module to access the descent engine easier. “What kind of issues did Luthor Corp say they were having with it?” she questioned, as she grabbed a ladder and began to climb up into the module.

“Umm,” Eliza started to respond before she trailed off and jogged slightly to the other end of the hangar where their team had been keeping the reports in anticipation for the LM’s arrival. While she flipped through the pages of the report, Lillian submerged herself in the LM and began to work to open the engine so she could access the valve.

“It looks like it was leaking externally,” Eliza finally reported and Lillian let out a frustrated huff. Furrowing her eyebrows, Eliza rounded the LM and watched as Lillian popped her head out with a frown. “What?” she inquired. “Did they not seal it properly?”

Lillian paused for a moment, before she finally asked, “Are we sure they didn’t send us LM-4 by mistake?”

Eliza raised her eyebrows and took in her friend’s inquiry. “It can’t be that bad,” she finally asserted in an attempt to comfort Lillian.

Shooting her a pointed look, Lillian climbed out of the module and gestured for Eliza to go in herself. “It’s riddled with inconsistencies. How are we going to send that to space?”

Lillian held her breath as she waited for Eliza to reemerge. Maybe she was being a tad dramatic, but the descent engine she just laid eyes on reminded her of the first test article prototype she had searched through storage to study last year. The work was rushed; she hadn’t stepped foot near an LM or LTA in the past five months and even she could tell.

When Eliza came out of the LM, her face was grim.

“We were barely starting to catch up with the schedule,” she lamented. “How are we going to get this ready to send up by the end of the year?”

Sighing, Lillian ran her hand through her hair. “We can’t,” she stated simply. “Apollo 8 requires a rendezvous. If something goes wrong and the astronauts can’t get back on the CSM, they’ll be stuck in the LM for reentry, and we didn’t build this craft to handle that. We’d be dooming the astronauts to even suggest sending them up in this before it’s fixed.”

Eliza huffed in frustration and leaned her head back on the LM in defeat. “Great,” she muttered. “Can’t wait for Kranz to find out.”

Kranz did find out, but luckily not from the two of them. The ascent engine team submitted their report first and took the brunt of Kranz’s anger the rest of the teams were trying to dance around for the day after the LM-3 arrived. The whole module was littered with defects that would undoubtedly push Apollo 8 back. No one heard from any NASA officials for the rest of the week, presumably as they tried to find some way to keep the Apollo program on track without an LM.

As they all waited for the announcement on what was to be done, Staudhammer requested everyone write up a report on the descent engine fixes that would need to be addressed before LM-3 would take flight. He wanted all eyes on their task at hand in an attempt to catch everything as quickly as possible.

A couple days after their reports were turned in, Eliza and Lillian were back to their desk work. Thankfully, the calculations were put on pause for the day as they set out to interpret all the results from the MDC test a few days prior.

"Did you hear the rumors?” Eliza finally asked, shuffling her papers and glancing up at Lillian. 

Someday she would have to ask her where she was getting her intel. Eliza always seemed to have one ear to the floor at the Manned Spacecraft Center. Lillian supposed if she ever interacted with anyone besides Eliza, she might learn information quickly as well, but for now, she was content receiving all her NASA gossip from her best friend. 

“They’re saying Michael Collins’ legs stopped working. He needs spinal surgery,” Eliza continued without waiting for Lillian to signal her to do so. 

Scoffing, Lillian shook her head and murmured, “The last thing this space program needs right now is an astronaut undergoing spinal surgery, so we better hope that’s just a rumor.”

Eliza was quiet for a moment before she informed Lillian, “My source is pretty reliable.”

Blinking and staring at her paper, Lillian slowly raised her eyes to Eliza’s and stared at her confused. “Who’s your source?” she asked, crinkling her eyebrows.

Clearing her throat, Eliza bit back a mischievous smile as she shrugged off, “I ran into Jeremiah Danvers when I went to get the drop test results earlier.”

Lillian’s mouth felt dry as she processed this information along with the smile on Eliza’s face. “Jeremiah Danvers?” she repeated, her fingers clenched tightly around her pencil as she could feel her expression beginning to close off.

“Yup,” Eliza confirmed, popping the ‘p’ sound and beaming at Lillian. “He’s here because they’ve moved him onto the Apollo 9 crew in place of Collins.”

Lillian opened her mouth to respond, but found she couldn’t think of anything to say. Her skin felt like it was burning, at the thought of Eliza running into the man who was so clearly pining after her. If no announcement had been made, Lillian was almost sure Danvers had been instructed to keep his new position underwraps, and yet he told Eliza. Lillian gritted down her jaw.

Eliza seemed to be waiting for some kind of response from Lillian though, so she prodded her when she didn’t get her way. “What was that you said about Danvers being last in line to go to space again?” she inquired innocently, and Lillian froze.

Letting out a long breath, she almost wanted to cry with relief. Eliza wasn’t taunting her about running into Jeremiah. She was taunting her about the bet.

When she had steadied herself, she forced a nonchalant expression on her face and responded, "And?"

Biting her lip and smirking, Eliza shrugged as she looked back down at her work. "Just thought you should know."

Lillian stared at her for a while, her heart and brain still trying to catch up to everything she had just experienced. Eventually, the feeling she landed on was a soft fluttering in her chest at the sight of Eliza smiling satisfiedly as she wrote on the paper in front of her.

"Last time I checked, the number nine is different from the number eight,” she eventually teased as she refocused on her own MDC results in front of her. “Jeremiah Danvers going up on Apollo 9 doesn’t mean anything to me.”

Eliza snorted and shook her head, but didn’t say anything else.

The next day, Kranz announced he would be addressing everyone after lunch. The lab seemed to be buzzing with theories on what the top officials decided to make of their current situation. The Collins news seemed to have been leaked as well, sending several of the engineers into quite the panic. Lillian did her best to not be amused by them.

Just before lunch, Staudhammer pulled Lillian and Eliza aside. Both of their hearts dropped when they saw his impassive face and their reports of suggested maintenance for LM-3 in his hands.

“Do either of you want to explain this?” he asked, holding up the reports and staring at them pointedly as soon as they were out of earshot of everyone else. Lillian and Eliza glanced at each other warily; what had they done?

“Both of your reports bring up some drastic measures,” he continued, beginning to flip through them. “Removing the reed switch, changing the alloy used for the solenoid valves, creating a whole new burst disk? These aren’t maintenance issues; they’re design issues.”

The women stared at him for a long moment.

“All due respect, sir,” Lillian finally started. “But those suggestions are-”

“Worthwhile,” Staudhammer finished, catching Lillian offguard. “I know,” he nodded, closing the reports. “What I want to know is how the two of you saw so clearly what the rest of the team missed.”

Lillian furrowed her eyebrows.

“Sir?” Eliza asked hesitantly.

“These suggestions are well thought out and will take away a lot of this machine’s variables; what are you both seeing differently from the rest of the team?” he pressed.

Both women were silent as a few seconds passed. Finally Eliza took a deep breath.

“You don’t let us work on the design,” she stated simply.

Staudhammer looked almost affronted at this statement, but before he could respond, Lillian cut in.

“No, she’s right,” she aided. “You don’t let us work on the design. We aren’t attached to any part of how the LM is made. All we see are the results and what doesn’t work.”

Staudhammer’s gaze wavered back and forth between the two women as he remained silent after Lillian’s explanation. The seconds began to feel like hours as they both held their breath waiting for a response.

Finally, sighing, Staudhammer lowered his head before looking back up at them. “Okay. I want you two heading all of the testing for LM-3. I need someone who isn’t going to be biased towards the current design looking at the results and seeing this stuff,” he informed them. “We don’t have time for any more setbacks, understand? You see an issue, there’s a report on my desk by the end of the day about how we’re fixing it.”

Lillian and Eliza both nodded numbly a moment before Staudhammer stalked away. Staring stunned after him, Lillian almost felt as if her body was buzzing. _What_ had just happened?

“Oh my god,” Eliza breathed beside her, and Lillian knew in Eliza speak, that meant she wanted to jump up and down and squeal. Instead, they settled for clasping eachother’s hands and squeezing so tightly in excitement, Lillian was surprised they didn’t hear any of their bones crack.

Following what felt like a promotion, both Lillian and Eliza entered Mission Control in good spirits, ready to handle whatever news Kranz would through their way. Nothing could dim Lillian’s energy now, she thought to herself proudly.

"Thank you for gathering, everyone,” Kranz entered a few minutes after everyone had arrived. He reached the podium and looked out upon the crowd staring at him expectantly, sighing.

“Okay, let’s jump straight in,” he finally conceded. “After several long and strenuous discussions about the delays in the LM production, the board has decided to greenlight a different Apollo 8 mission this December.” 

Murmurs began to cycle around the room, and Lillian’s ears perked up at the information. This was certainly unexpected, she thought. The current mission order was a pretty strict standard NASA had set. 

“This mission will be a manned CSM flight that will leave Earth's orbit to orbit the moon,” Kranz continued, and everyone began murmuring even more loudly. They would leave Earth’s orbit for Apollo 8? That was further than anyone had ever gone before. “Now, McDivitt was offered to stay on schedule, but due to his team's training and expertise in testing the LM, they have decided to wait to go up until Apollo 9,” Kranz pressed on and the moment this information hit Lillian, she felt like the breath was knocked out of her. She knew what Kranz was going to announce next before he said it.

“This means Jeremiah Danvers will lead Apollo 8 this December," he finished, and Lillian’s expression immediately dropped.

"Motherfucker," she whispered under her breath, and beside her, Eliza strained to hold back her laugh of pure, unadulterated glee.

Lillian was not planning on Eliza falling asleep in bed with her the night before her own birthday, which made Lillian’s plan for the day a bit difficult to accomplish.

They had stayed up late the night before, discussing all the tests they wanted to run through with LM-3 starting on Monday. It wasn’t the most exciting way to spend a Saturday night, but it was becoming one of Lillian’s favorite ways. Lillian didn’t remember falling asleep with Eliza in her bed this time; she was becoming too used to it.

When she awoke, she realized what a mistake she had made. Pulling off Eliza’s birthday surprise was going to require sneaking out of the house without her realizing, almost an impossible feat given Eliza was an incredibly light sleeper, and she was currently curled tightly into Lillian’s side.

Sighing quietly, Lillian decided to try and see if she could slip out of Eliza’s grasp, but almost as if she had sensed Lillian’s intention of moving, she felt Eliza stir beside her.

“G’morning,” she murmured, the sleep apparent in her voice as she yawned. “M’sorry I fell asleep here again,” she then apologized. “Your bed’s too comfortable for its own good.”

Snorting and using this opportunity to wiggle out of the bed and escape to the bathroom, Lillian shook her head. “Don’t worry about it; if my bed didn’t intervene, you’re the one who would need spinal surgery from that atroscity you call a mattress.” Eliza let out a giggle, and Lillian shut the bathroom door shut behind her, letting out a long breath.

Her plan had been foiled, and she would have to come up with a new way to pull this off. She frowned as she considered her options. Eliza usually took ten minutes to fully wake up; maybe she could call-

“Hey, I was thinking,” Eliza called out, interrupting Lillian’s thoughts. “Maybe tonight we could go grab dinner at that fancy restaurant you’ve been going on and on about these past few months,” she suggested, the hope evident in her voice. She had once again failed to mention her birthday to Lillian, but it was clear she expected Lillian to have remembered.

The restaurant in question was Lillian’s favorite in Houston: Basi. She had been wanting to take Eliza for a while, but Eliza always turned her down, refusing to agree to go to a place she knew she couldn’t afford because it would mean conceding to allowing Lillian to pay for her. Eliza was proud like that, and who was Lillian to fault her? She just dreaded the day Eliza inevitably realized Lillian only charged her a quarter of the monthly rent, instead of half like they agreed upon.

Thankfully, however, the rules Eliza set for herself were void on her birthday.

“Sure!” she answered through the door before she quickly exited and smiled at the birthday girl, who was watching her with a lazy grin. “I have to go make a quick call, but then I’ll start breakfast?” she asked, and Eliza nodded eagerly, clearly happy Lillian had remembered her birthday after all.

Lillian’s call in a hushed voice to rearrange her plans didn’t seem to cause any suspicion to Eliza, and Lillian breathed easier afterwards. They chatted as they ate breakfast and then passed most of the day working on their own projects. Eliza wanted to get laundry done before the upcoming work week; Lillian sat curled up on the couch reading.

By the time they were ready to leave for dinner, Eliza was all but giddy with excitement.

“Can we take your car?” Lillian asked, and Eliza nearly stopped in her tracks.

Furrowing her eyebrows, she pointed out, “My car is a day away from death, and I haven’t driven it in over a month.” Anymore, Eliza just rode with Lillian everywhere.

“My brakes started grinding last night when I went to pick up groceries,” Lillian explained with a shrug, the lie coming to her almost naturally. “I want to replace the brake pads before I drive it anywhere else.”

“You realize my car is still less safe than a car without brake pads, right?” Eliza inquired incredulously. Lillian snorted and gestured towards the car.

“Come on, we’re just going downtown,” she insisted. “I’ll even drive.”

Eliza was right, of course. Her car _was_ a day away from death, and while she refused to show it, Lillian was tense with worry the entire drive into downtown Houston. When they arrived, Lillian luckily had hardly any troubles finding a parking spot close to their destination.

They were immediately met by the host when they walked into Basi and led to their reserved table. As they were handed their menus, Lillian could tell Eliza was near a panic attack just looking at the prices on everything.

Leaning over, Lillian murmured, “Don’t worry about it; I’m paying. You deserve something nice.”

Eliza’s eyes looked up to hers with a mixture of appreciation and protest. She knew Lillian was going to have to pay for her when she agreed to this restaurant, but she still stubbornly wished she didn’t have to rely on her friend. Her cheeks warmed slightly from the gesture, and she opened her mouth to put up a small fight, but Lillian shook her head subtly, and something about her expression thankfully stopped Eliza before she could start.

Lillian then quickly set her sights on her menu, deciding to focus on what she would eat and not on how beautiful Eliza looked in the soft lighting of the restaurant. If she stayed in that mindset for too long, she would start allowing herself to imagine this evening was something more than just taking her best friend out for her birthday.

“You know, I feel bad I didn’t get you a present,” Lillian murmured after they had both ordered their food and were sitting in a comfortable silence.

Eliza glanced up at her, almost as if she wasn’t expecting Lillian to continue to bring up her birthday. She shrugged her off. “I don’t need anything,” she reasoned.

Letting a smile turn the corner of her lips, Lillian tilted her head. “Still,” she pushed, “you only turn twenty-eight once.”

Reaching across the table to grap her friend’s hands, Eliza squeezed slightly and painted a reassuring smile on her face. “Consider this dinner your gift,” she insisted, and Lillian gripped her fingers. “Besides, I’m honestly just impressed you remembered the date,” Eliza continued, pulling back and taking a sip of her wine. When Lillian quirked her eyebrow at her, Eliza shrugged again and argued, “Since we have the day off, no one could tell you.”

Lillian tried to control the confusion morphing through her mind and not let it show through her expression. She had assumed she had exposed how closely she paid attention to Eliza’s life last year when she had acknowledged her birthday. Eliza, unsurprisingly, had found another way to justify the interaction. Lillian wasn’t sure if she was disappointed or relieved.

“I guess I have a pretty remarkable memory,” Lillian suggested eventually, a teasing glint in her eyes, and Eliza huffed out a laugh and shook her head in amusement. For a split second though, Lillian saw a flash of recognition in her eyes, and she felt her own cheeks heat up.

The rest of the dinner went by quickly, spent mostly in friendly conversation. There were a few moments they disrupted most of the restaurant with their laughter and antics, and it was one of the only times Lillian was thankful her last name got her out of any reprimanding. It was Eliza’s birthday and she deserved to be as loud and carefree in a stuffy five star restaurant as she wished.

At the end of the meal, Lillian insisted on buying a bottle of champagne for future use; Eliza reluctantly agreed when Lillian left no room for her to dissent. When the bill was settled, the two walked hand in hand out of the restaurant, still deep in their conversation about the latest episode of _Star Trek_ the night before. Eliza was passionately recounting to Lillian how she felt the show’s doom in the near future, and Lillian merely smiled and tried to focus on what her friend was saying. She felt like she was being coiled up inside, waiting to explode, but she tried to remain impassive as they casually walked down the street.

“Lillian?” Eliza breathed out suddenly, her voice almost panicked as she stopped in her tracks and let go of Lillian’s hand. “Where’s my car?”

“What?” Lillian asked, furrowing her eyebrows as she bit her cheek and forced herself to maintain her neutral face.

“My _car_ ,” Eliza repeated, pointing harshly down the road to the empty parking spot her car once occupied. “No, no, no, no,” she then shook her head as she sped up her walk and looked desperately around the vicinity in hopes she had just remembered the placement wrong. “Do you think it was towed or stolen?” she then turned to ask Lillian, who was standing back a ways, watching her friend go through her inner turmoil.

“What are you talking about?” Lillian inquired innocently, and Eliza looked at her like she’d grown a new head.

Throwing her hands up in exasperation, Eliza waved her arms around and nearly yelled, “How are you not freaking out right now? My car is gone!”

Lillian just watched her impassively and narrowed her eyes. “No it’s not,” she reasoned, as if this were obvious, and Eliza looked as if she were on the verge of a mental break. “Eliza,” Lillian comforted her with a small laugh, which did nothing to calm her friend down. “I don’t know why you’re so worked up when your car’s right here.”

She gestured beside her to a brand new, butternut yellow Chevy Camaro, and Eliza blinked.

“Did you hit your head or something?” she finally asked. “Do you not remember the junkpile I drive?”

“You don’t drive a junkpile,” Lillian insisted, a moment before she tossed Eliza a set of keys. 

Eliza caught them instinctively but looked stricken. After a moment she took in a sharp breath and widened her eyes as she finally realized what was happening.

“I- I just told you I didn’t want any gifts!” she finally sputtered, her eyes having a hard time choosing whether to focus on Lillian or her brand new car.

Letting out a loud laugh, Lillian finally let a smile spill onto her face as she asserted, “Then don’t see it as a gift. It’s just me following through on my end of the bet.”

“The bet was a _joke_ ,” Eliza then pushed, unsuccessful trying to glare at Lillian as her shock was still too much to overcome.

Shrugging, Lillian explained, “I’m a woman of my word, Eliza Worthington. You did the impossible; you get a car.”

Eliza sat staring at her for another long moment, her expression one of subdued excitement and utter exasperation. Finally, she gave in and lunged towards Lillian, pulling her friend into a tight hug, her arms wrapped around her neck.

Lillian stiffened and eventually returned the hug, allowing her head to drop slightly into Eliza’s hair. When she heard Eliza whisper “I love you”, she felt her heart expand and she tightened her grip on her friend. They held each other there for what felt like several minutes before Eliza finally pulled back.

When she did so she sniffed, and Lillian realized she had started crying. Wiping her tears and laughing at herself, she then shook her head and murmured, “You really don’t know how much this means to me.”

Reaching out and grabbing her hand, Lillian smiled at her softly in understanding, before she squeezed her hand slightly and gestured towards the car. “Come on,” she directed. “Try it out.”

Eliza didn’t need any more prodding. She quickly skipped to the driver’s side and inserted her key. Lillian bit back her amused smile and went to open the passenger side.

“Where do you want to go?” Eliza asked, turning the key and starting the car with a hum.

Chuckling, Lillian raised her eyebrows and inquired, “Are we not just going home?”

Shaking her head, Eliza glanced over at her with wide eyes. “There’s a whole universe out there to go see,” she reminded Lillian pointedly. “And besides,” she continued after a moment, her voice hesitating and becoming quiet. “Home is wherever we go together.”

Lillian felt a lump grow in her throat as her eyes held Eliza’s. The air hung heavy around Eliza’s assertion, but Lillian wasn’t about to correct her. There was nothing to correct. They were two women who had been wandering seemingly lost in the world until they grounded each other.

“Well then,” Lillian finally murmured thickly. “How about we go see the universe?”

They drove for almost two hours out of the city, no destination in mind. All the channels on the radio were scrolled through twice before they finally agreed on one to settle on. Lillian found herself trying to stare out into the night as they drove, but her gaze was always pulled back in on the woman beside her. Like a magnet.

The windows were rolled down, music blasting, Eliza’s hair being pulled from her ponytail and whipped around her. She sang idly along with the radio and the smile never left her lips as she gripped the steering wheel so tightly, Lillian was sure she was afraid it would disappear right from under her.

Every now and then, Eliza would glance over at Lillian with a smirk, like she knew she was being watched. Lillian didn’t have it in herself to even pretend to be bashful about being caught staring so many times. It was all she could do to contain all the beautiful and tragic thoughts she had about her best friend.

“Look,” Eliza murmured, turning the volume down on the radio and leaning forward to look upwards. The car came to a stop on a small back road as Eliza pulled over, and without warning, Eliza unclicked her seatbelt and bolted out of the car into the middle of the road.

Almost startled, Lillian fumbled with her seatbelt to follow. As she exited the car and went to follow Eliza, she found her with her neck arched all the way back, staring up at the night sky longingly.

“I never get to see the stars this clearly anymore,” she murmured dreamily before letting out a long sigh. “The only thing I dislike about the city,” she then continued. “I’m without my muse.”

Turning up the corners of her lips slightly as she watched from the side of the road, Lillian offered, “You know the stars are always there, even when you don’t see them?”

Blinking and looking towards Lillian with a scrunch in her nose, Eliza shook her head. “It’s not the same,” she insisted.

Lillian raised her eyebrows and smirked at her friend, who immediately skipped over to her and took her hands in her own.

“Look up,” Eliza instructed, staring at Lillian earnestly. 

Lillian held her breath and after a few moments, was able to wrench her gaze away from Eliza and up towards the stars.

Lillian couldn’t think of the last time the stars seemed so bright and vibrant, but she was inclined to blame that on the woman standing next to her.

“It’s the whole universe,” Eliza whispered, still squeezing Lillian’s hands. “We found it.”

A soft smile crossed Lillian’s lips as she looked back down at Eliza who was staring back up at the stars. “We did,” she answered softly, unable to help herself. Eliza glanced back down, with wide innocent eyes. Her eyebrows quirked into a small question, and Lillian felt her skin flush.

Letting go of her hands, Eliza instead turned to the car. “We should name it,” she announced, and Lillian raised her eyebrows slightly.

“Yeah?” she inquired softly.

Eliza nodded determinedly and her eyes met Lillian’s again. “It’s got a big responsibility ahead of it. One day it’s going to take us away from NASA, know-it-all men, and government red tape. The least we can do is give it a name,” she pushed, and Lillian let out a small snort.

“Okay,” she conceded. “How about… Stargazer 3000?”

Eliza let out a loud laugh at the suggestion, to which Lillian quickly followed suit.

“No, no,” Eliza corrected her. “A name. An actual name. Like you were naming a child, Lillian,” she continued, her voice cracking as Lillian laughed a little louder.

“Okay, okay,” Lillian held up her hands in surrender as Eliza teasingly swatted at her to take the task at hand seriously. “A name that would take us to the vast regions of space.”

“Yeah, something like, I don’t know…” Eliza started, pondering the car for a moment.

The name hit Lillian, and she knew it was perfect. Who could take them further than the first man to ever walk in space?

“Alex,” they both suggested at the same time, before turning and blinking at eachother in surprise.

Breaking out into a large beam, Eliza turned to her vehicle satisfied. “Well I guess that’s that,” she stated easily. “Alex,” she repeated with a small smile. A beat later she was opening the car door and rummaging through their things. Lillian watched her curiously before she reemerged with the bottle of champagne.

“Already?” Lillian asked hesitantly.

“We just named our car,” Eliza shot back pointedly. “What better to celebrate?”

Lillian wanted to point out it was _Eliza’s_ car, but she bit back her comment and just smirked. Taking this as an approval, Eliza went to open the bottle, removing the foil and cage. When she finally got the bottle to pop open, Eliza let out a small squeal before sobering up slightly.

Holding the bottle out in front of her, she raised it up to the sky and looked purposefully at Lillian.

“To the universe,” she toasted, before taking a swig straight from the bottle and then handing it over to Lillian.

Lillian hesitated for a moment before she wrapped her fingers around the bottle neck and lifted it up slightly, her eyes never leaving Eliza’s. “To our future,” she murmured softly, and she watched as Eliza shot her a soft smile just before she tilted the bottle back to drink herself.

Then, wrapping her hand around Lillian’s, Eliza just squeezed slightly. “To Alex,” she finished.

Lillian bit her cheek, just before she repeated, “To Alex.”

“Ladies, I need the results for the quad-check-valve leakage.”

Lillian blinked up at Staudhammer as he entered the room, a blush quickly covering her face as she felt caught. She had only just glanced up and was stopped, watching Eliza concentrate on a new solenoid design. It was mesmerizing how deep in thought Eliza became, and everytime she got this way her forehead would wrinkle as she hummed and tapped her foot behind her. Lillian doubted she was even conscious she was doing it.

Popping up unperturbed, Eliza reached across the table of their new lab area for the neatly compiled report they had finished earlier in the morning. “Got it right here for you,” she assured Staudhammer, and as the pages reached his hands, he immediately began to flip through it.

Without waiting on him, Eliza continued, “The excess internal leakage seems to have been caused by contamination on the seat. We don’t think any design changes are necessary, but the assembly, installation and cleaning procedures should be reevaluated. Our suggestions are listed in section four.”

Staudhammer grunted in approval and turned to leave the room without another word, but before he could, Eliza called out, “Has there been any word on Apollo 7?”

Their team manager stopped, pausing his flipping through their report pages. “Schirra’s team just completed their eighty-sixth orbit around Earth; they’re on course for reentry in five days. Which means the CSM teams got their shit together, and we have five months to get ours together for Apollo 9.”

“I don’t think we’ll have anything to worry about,” Eliza assured him confidently. “With all the fixes we’ve made in the past few months, I think five months is plenty of time to have the descent engine ready.”

Snapping the report closed, Staudhammer nodded and rolled it up in his hands. “You better be right,” he observed, but he seemed to be talking more to himself than Eliza. “Great work as usual, Dr. Worthington and Dr. Marshall,” he then lightened up. “I’ll get this to the guys and the higher ups immediately so these changes can be implemented.”

As Staudhammer spun on his heel to leave the room, Lillian felt the urge to ask, not for the first time, if the men from their team knew of their new position or if they thought the women had been relocated to calculations permanently. She knew Staudhammer had informed them a new team dedicated just to testing the design was being formed to more clearly see the flaws, but she found herself doubting he disclosed exactly who made up that team.

While a small, petty part of her wished the men knew what work her and Eliza were completing, she couldn’t blame Staudhammer for omitting this information either. Who knew how seriously their design suggestions would be taken otherwise.

Sighing and slumping back down in her chair to go through more data, Eliza commented, “I’m glad there’s a MDC test this afternoon. These solenoids are driving me up a wall, and I need a win right now.”

Lillian kept her face impassive besides the slight raise of her eyebrow. “Successfully turning in a report doesn’t count as a win for you?” she teased, and Eliza rolled her eyes.

“You know as well as I do that that was the easiest report we’ve completed yet. What’s the problem? It’s dirty. What’s the solution? Clean it,” Eliza pointed out sarcastically.

“Or don’t get it dirty,” Lillian added, a smirk at the corner of her smile, and Eliza nodded with a laugh.

“ _Or_ don’t get it dirty,” she agreed grinning. “I must say, solving that issue alone made my PhD worth it.”

Snorting, Lillian observed, “I can retire happy knowing I told Lionel Luthor to not put his grubby hands all over the quad check valves.”

At this, Eliza let out a loud laugh and folded over on her chair. After a moment, when she had sobered up, she bit her cheek guiltily. “You can tell we’ve been working here too long,” Eliza suggested. “Any small jab at Lionel makes me so happy.”

Lillian chuckled in agreement at this, and darted her eyes over to Eliza curiously. All in all, Lionel was a fairly agreeable contractor, and on top of that, he had been the one to relieve Eliza of her guilt during the LTA-5 fiasco. Lillian couldn’t think of any reason Eliza would dislike Lionel besides he was rich and…

And he wanted to marry Lillian.

Eliza’s eyes met Lillian’s briefly, before clearing her throat and darting her gaze away. Lillian found herself still staring at her, watching as a light blush covered her cheeks, and Lillian felt her own warm up as well. Finally finding the decency in her to look back down at her work, Lillian remained silent the rest of the morning, forcing herself to concentrate on the work at hand.

By the time the MDC test rolled around after lunch, Eliza and Lillian gratefully relieved themselves from their lab to go join the debrief before the test. They weren’t sure which test format would be performed today; they had already successfully completed two tests under nominal conditions. Lillian hoped they would test malfunciton conditions next, as it would likely have the most data to comb through and defects to fix.

Steve handed them both a small packet upon arrival, and Lillian nearly rolled her eyes when she read the cover.

_LTA-5D MDC Test 3: Off-Nominal Conditions_

So much for giving her and Eliza plenty of time to prepare for malfunction before next March, she thought bitterly. Eliza seemed to realize what she had, and let out an annoyed huff as well, but both women remained silent on the matter. It was too late to fix it now, and Staudhammer hadn’t given them the option to put forth their input on the matter after the last MDC test.

“Alright everyone, let’s head up to the lookout, the test begins in twenty minutes,” Steve then directed, passing an annoyed look at the two women glaring at him in the back.

Lillian set her jaw, matching his gaze, but Eliza seemed unperturbed next to her.

“Go easy on him, Lil,” Eliza soothed her with a small graze on her forearm. “He doesn’t know what tests should go first. They teach that in undergraduate physics, which he failed.”

Lillian immediately had to bite her cheek to keep her laugh from bursting out. Dropping her wide eyes to Eliza’s who was staring up at her calmly with a smirk, Lillian shook her head. “He did not,” she refuted, but she was met with a solemn nod from Eliza. “How in the world do you know that, Worthington?”

“The girls in calculating are friends with the girls in HR, and they like to gossip when I pick up the new data spreads every week. I’ve casually dropped some names of the guys who give us the most trouble, and they happen to mention some rumors they’ve heard about them the next week,” Eliza explained with a shrug, but the smile on her lips betrayed how gleefully delighted she was just to have dirt on the men on their team. “Turns out our marks from grad school are the best on our team. Who would have guessed?”

Lillian stared at Eliza in a bit of shock, before she finally let out a quiet laugh and shook her head. “I love you,” she then murmured, and Eliza beamed up at her.

“Just doing my civic duty,” Eliza responded promptly, but her fingers reached over to Lillian’s and squeezed them tightly. “Come on, better head up to the lookout. Steve might need us to explain Newton’s second law of motion to him.”

Lillian didn’t have enough time to stop the loud laugh from escaping her lips.

Lillian was grateful she had the descent engine to work on the past two months. If she hadn’t had something to keep her mind busy, she was sure she would have lost it by now. Simply the mention of the words ‘President-Elect Richard Nixon’ made her skin crawl and gave her the strong urge to throw the nearest object at a wall.

Lillian had met Nixon on several occasions in the years previous, always at her father’s parties. Hubert Humpfrey might be dimwitted, but at least he wasn’t a malicious ass. It felt like the country took five leaps backwards. Lillian threw as much money as she could to anti-war efforts and the NAACP, and then found herself stuck in the Manning Spacecraft Center once again. Pretending that sending a man to the moon would make anything on Earth better.

Apollo 8 was set to take off to orbit the moon in a week, and while the LM team didn’t get their first real test of their module until March, everyone seemed to be holding their breath and focusing on the impending mission. It felt like the only thing anyone could do for any semblence of control.

Lillian saw Danvers’ team in the debriefing room earlier that morning. They were flying out to Florida this afternoon where they would do the rest of their preparation for the journey. 

Eliza and her took their lunch break walking around the CSM labs. They were on the outer ring of the building, and most of their teams were back in the control room, putting together plans for every possible situation. It was no small feat leaving Earth’s orbit for the first time, and all of NASA felt the impending weight of that feat more and more each day.

Over Eliza’s shoulder, Lillian caught a glimpse of a figure running towards them. She froze, and noticing her rigid posture, Eliza furrowed her eyebrows before she turned to see what her friend was staring at. Finding Jeremiah Danvers almost upon her, Eliza let out a short gasp of surprise.

“Aren’t you supposed to be getting on a plane right now?” she questioned before he could say anything, and he flashed her his signature charming smile. Lillian bit back her frown. 

It was hard not to notice how much the man had been taking a more overt interest in Eliza of late; everywhere he went, his eyes were always searching for her. Eliza had even mentioned to Lillian how often she had been running into him on the way to grab data. Lillian knew it couldn’t be an accident, and yet Eliza always seemed genuinely surprised by it. Lillian wanted to call her out on it, but found she never wished to push the issue. She didn’t want to become a catalyst for whatever Jeremiah’s plans were.

“Eliza Worthington,” Jeremiah began, ignoring Eliza’s question and taking her hand softly in his. “When I return home from the moon, I’m taking you on a proper date,” he declared with a confident grin. Eliza blinked at this information, and before she could respond, Jeremiah spun on his heel and trotted away.

Staring after him a bit baffled, she eventually let out a small laugh. Lillian felt a tension building in her heart as a thin smile stretched across her lips as well.

“What was that?” Eliza finally asked seemingly no one in particular. Her eyebrows were furrowed, but she still seemed to be laughing hysterically. Lillian watched her warily. “Why would Jeremiah Danvers want to take me on a date?” she questioned, her voice becoming more serious and her grin becoming one more of disbelief rather than shock.

Bristling, Lillian tried to shrug it off and shifted her weight on her feet. “Probably because he wants a wife,” she reasoned, the comment slipping through her lips before she could fully consider it, and Eliza nearly stopped in her tracks, panic seeping into her expression.

“A wife?” she asked, uncertain. She watched Lillian carefully for a moment before she shook her head. “You’re just messing with me, aren’t you,” she then asserted, tension leaving her body as she let out a small laugh.

How desperately Lillian wished she were joking. She had known since she watched Jeremiah approach her that first time what his intentions were. And Eliza was playing dumb now, but she would eventually do what every sensible woman did and marry him. Only silly, stupid women like herself turned down a successful man’s offer.

Eliza seemed quiet and contemplative for the rest of the day, and Lillian did nothing to interupt her thoughts. Instead she stayed ingrained in her own, unable to pull Jeremiah Danvers’ face from her mind. It shouldn’t bother her as much as it did. She knew what was going to happen; she was only hurting herself if she considered any other alternative. Besides, her and Eliza were just friends. Best friends, but only friends. She knew the consequences of believing anything else painfully well.

At the end of the day, Eliza signalled she was done by slapping her folder shut and looking up at Lillian expectantly. Lillian was in the middle of inputing a data sheet into their computer database when she glanced up at Eliza, eyebrows raised.

“You ready?” Eliza repeated her originally silent question, shooting Lillian a soft, hesitant smile. She was about to turn her down and tell her to wait another twenty minutes until she had everything wrapped up, but she stopped herself. She knew twenty minutes would turn into an hour quickly, and the thought going home with Eliza and letting their light conversation take over again eventually won out.

Lillian shut down all her programs and organized the papers on her desk. By the time she was done, Eliza was standing with her jacket on and holding her work bag patiently. As soon as Lillian grabbed her own coat and looked up at her, Eliza turned and they both began to leave the quiet building. It wasn’t empty, the CSM team had been pulling all nighters recently in preparation for Apollo 8, but the LM teams had long since left.

As they exited and were met with the crisp, cool air of the winter, Lillian began to notice Eliza sending her worried glances every few seconds or so. She met one of them with a quizzical look, but Eliza quickly turned away and refused to meet her eyes again.

Lillian was perplexed, but didn’t say anything as she slipped into the passenger side of the car. Eliza followed her a few moments later, quickly turning the key to start the engine, and then stalling and sitting, staring out onto the Manned Spacecraft Center.

Lillian was about to inquire if she was okay, when Eliza spoke. “Alex drive?” she inquired simply, keeping her gaze fixed on the empty space in front of her.

A small weight felt lifted off of Lillian’s shoulders. “Alex drive,” she confirmed, with a small nod, and Eliza put her car into drive and began their journey.

It didn’t take long before they were leaving the city limits and became enveloped in the dark world around them. Eliza got off on a random exit and began to take several turns through barren back country roads. That was the goal of these drives. To get as far away and as lost as possible in hopes of finding a small piece of themselves back after a particularly demeaning day at work.

Usually they would vent about what happened throughout the day, but this time, both women remained stiff and quiet. Lillian noticed Eliza was gripping the steering wheel so tightly, her knuckles were turning white.

When they finally pulled over on an abandoned road, Eliza stayed frozen in her spot not moving.

“I’m not going on a date with Jeremiah,” she stated finally, and Lillian blinked in surprise.

“You’re not?” she questioned, turning in her seat to look at Eliza with concern. “Why not?”

“Because you don’t like him, and I trust you,” Eliza stated matter-of-factly, and Lillian felt an icy burn in her veins.

She was silent for a long moment, trying to think of anything to say. Part of her was relieved Eliza was going to turn Jeremiah down, but the other half of her felt guilty. Her jealousy was going to ruin this for Eliza.

“I don’t not like him,” she finally offered slowly, guilt winning out, even as it felt like a knife to her chest.

Eliza counted easily. “But you don’t like him either.”

Sighing, Lillian buried her head in her hands, unsure how whether Eliza went on a date with an incredibly successful man was now hinging on Lillian. “You should go on a date with him, Eliza,” Lillian stated bluntly, not willing to hash this out with Eliza. Her chest felt like it was constricting. “ _You_ like him.”

“And _you_ keep dodging me, Marshall,” Eliza shot back, her eyebrows furrowing. “What is it? That I could do better?”

Shaking her head, Lillian pressed her lips together. “No. He’s great, it’s not-”

“He is great and sweet, and I think we would be good together,” Eliza reasoned, before pausing and looking at Lillian pointedly. “But you seemed so offput by it. Is there something I don’t know? Is he a jerk? Is he secretly married? Do _you_ like him?” 

Lillian recoiled at Eliza’s accusation, and before she could process it, she shook her head and quickly refuted, “No, it’s nothing like that.”

Eliza’s eyes narrowed as Lillian cringed. “But there is something,” she finally acknowledged, prompting Lillian to keep talking, but Lillian felt as if her heart was lodged in her chest.

She couldn’t meet Eliza’s eyes, her breathing slowly as she tried to blink back her tears. Lillian swore Eliza could hear how rapidly her heart was pounding, sure she could sense how nervous she was. She once again considered telling Eliza the truth, but stopped herself from going too far down that path. She couldn’t bear to lose Eliza or ruin her either, especially since she had Jeremiah now. It was better this way.

“I think you’re a smart match,” Lillian finally choked out. “I’ve just seen too many women give up science for men; I’m sorry,” she then explained, her words coming out with a sigh and her eyes met Eliza’s hesitantly.

Eliza stared at her for a long moment, as if she were trying to dissect Lillian’s words. Lillian’s body began to feel warm as she considered the possibility of Eliza seeing through her, but luckily, after a minute, Eliza blinked and softened her expression.

Taking Lillian’s hand in her own comfortingly, Eliza reassured her, “I could never love a man enough to give up science.” Lillian squeezed her fingers slightly but couldn’t quite meet her gaze. “I do want to fall in love though,” Eliza admitted after a moment, her voice so quiet, Lillian barely heard her.

When Lillian looked up, Eliza was watching her intently, waiting. Lillian swallowed thickly, and their fingers instinctively interlocked. After holding her breath for a moment, Lillian let out a raspy sigh and shot Eliza a genuine smile. “Then you will,” she stated simply.

Eliza ducked her gaze and held only Lillian’s hand tightly. “You don’t hate him?” she asked again, looking back up to search Lillian’s expression.

Placing her other hand on top of hers and Eliza’s, Lillian shook her head. “I don’t hate him,” she promised. Some lingering sadness remained in her expression, but enough of her sincerity came through to abate Eliza’s anxiety on issue for the time being.

“Okay,” she accepted, nodding more to herself than to Lillian. Slowly she untangled her fingers from Lillians and turned to look back out at the dark, quiet world surrounding them. “We better start trying to find our way back,” she announced, sitting up slightly and turning the key in the ignition.

Lillian remained silent, grateful driving would keep Eliza distracted enough she wouldn’t see the few tears that had slipped onto Lillian’s cheeks in the darkness.

The flashes of anxiety had been steadily worsening in the past days. Lillian caught herself several times zoning out after something Eliza said or did. Usually she had it under control, but even Eliza was beginning to notice.

“You good?” Eliza asked with a concerned smirk at the corner of her lips as she glanced across the desk at Lillian. If she looked closely enough, Lillian could see the faltering behind Eliza’s expression as she took in Lillian staring at her.

Lillian knew why she was wary. She had perfected her stone cold zoning out face in primary school, knowing from a very young age if she wanted to make it anywhere in life, she wouldn’t be able to give anything away without her consent. Her stomach churned slightly as she was once again reminded of how wary Eliza used to be of her because of this exact standoffishness. Ever since their talk in the car the previous week, Eliza seemed to be slipping into an uncertain area with Lillian quicker; she could sense something about the conversation was left unresolved, but Lillian could tell she didn’t want to re-approach the subject either.

Forcing a tight smile on her lips as she glanced down at her paperwork, Lillian shook her head and murmured, “All good. Just lost in thought.” Eliza looked visibly relieved at the answer and shrugged as she also turned back down to her work. Lillian was always so marvelled by how open Eliza always was, every emotion always alight her face. It fascinated her; it pulled her in. 

How did someone so vulnerable make it just as far as herself? It was an answer she wanted so badly, it was almost intoxicating. It was one of the main reasons she’d been so gravitated towards Eliza from the beginning.

“If they don’t do malfunction conditions for the next MDC test, I’m going above their heads,” Eliza muttered, as she angrily scratched down some numbers that clearly were getting on her nerves. For the briefest moment she reminded Lillian of-

Lillian swallowed thickly, knowing she was teetering on a dangerous edge. There was still three hours left in the workday, too early for her thoughts to become this muddled. She couldn’t afford to go down memory lane. Not now; not again. It wasn’t conducive to anything, she chided herself as she gripped her pencil tightly and stared at the paper as if the numbers would just appear before her.

Before she could push it out of her mind, she remembered exactly how the phone sounded before she picked it up.

“Hello?” she heard her voice answer in the darkest recesses of her mind, and she knew she was stuck. She was going to be forced to watch it all play out again.

“Lillian, hey,” the voice answered breathlessly on the other end of the line. It sounded so familiar and yet unrecognizable in her memory. It sounded off. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but it was incorrect.

Unconsciously, Lillian had let out a smile. “Marianne! Hey! I’ve been trying to get ahold of you all summer, but I guess I had the wrong-”

“Lillian,” her best friend’s voice cut her off, and something in her tone made Lillian stop cold. “I’m just calling to let you know I’ve withdrawn my attendance to MIT this fall.”

The silence that hung between them felt suffocating as Lillian’s jaw hung open and she fought to find any words to say.

“You’re one of three women accepted into the program, Marianne,” Lillian finally gritted, the words coming out a bit harsher and more desperate than she intended. She paused, as if she were waiting for her friend to offer any kind of explanation, but when she didn’t, Lillian continued, letting her words spew from her. “No. I’m not letting you do this. I’m going to drive to that bum-fuck, small-minded, pervasive disease of a town, and march straight up to your door and tear your parents to shreds if they don’t let you get your doctorate.”

Lillian paused smugly as she tightened her grip on her phone and waited for Marianne’s response. She knew this would happen. She knew she would let her go home for the summer and then-

“I’m pregnant,” she finally heard Marianne's small voice from across the phone line, and this time Lillian felt like she had the wind knocked out of her.

“You- what?” Lillian asked, stunned. “By who- how- are you okay? I know a doctor; I can be there in a day,” she then continued, trying to rationalize the situation in her mind.

“No, Lillian,” she stopped her, her voice now eerily calm. And Lillian knew what she was going to say before she said it. “No, I don’t think my husband would like that.”

The words hit her like a train. Lillian clenched her jaw as she heard Marianne’s ragged breaths on the other end of the line, until finally her voice spoke up again, saying, “Please say somethi-”

She hung up before she could hear Marianne finish.

When she blinked back into reality, Eliza was staring at her concerned again. Before she could say anything, Lillian abruptly stood from her stool and made a weak excuse that she needed to go to the restroom.

As she curled up in the bathroom stall and tried to fight the tears, she realized what was off about Marianne’s voice in her memories.

It wasn’t her voice; it was Eliza’s.

She wasn’t sure how long she sat there before Eliza finally came to search for her. When she took Lillian in, balled up on the floor and staring out at nothing, she didn’t say anything. She just silently sat down beside her and rested her head on Lillian’s shoulder comfortingly, reaching over for her hand and signalling her patience to wait for whenever Lillian would be able to talk.

“Her name was Marianne,” Lillian eventually admitted, her voice barely above a whisper. “We met our last semester of undergraduate, and we were best friends,” she continued, but her voice caught as another memory flashed through her mind.

_“I love you, Lillian Marshall. I’ve always loved you,” Marianne whispered in the darkness of the night, just before she leaned forward and pressed her lips to Lillian’s._

Blinking, Lillian recoiled from the memory and ducked her head. “She was supposed to come to MIT with me. We were going to turn down our offers of marriage, get our degrees, become independent. We were going to do it together.”

Squeezing her hand slightly, Eliza stared out at the bathroom wall for a moment before asking quietly, “What happened?”

“She got married,” Lillian explained simply. “Dropped out, became a teacher. I heard she had four kids.”

Eliza pressed her lips together and nodded at this. After a minute, she took a sharp breath in. “You won’t be able to get rid of me that easily, Marshall,” she promised, and Lillian let out a soft scoff as she tried to subtly wipe the tears from her eyes. “I couldn’t imagine a single scenario where I leave you for teaching,” she continued, poking Lillian playfully to cheer her up, and Lillian relented with a small smile.

“Oh, I don’t know. I think you’d be adorable with all those tiny brains to mold,” Lillian offered seriously, but Eliza let out a loud laugh and shoved her slightly.

“Plenty of tiny brains to mold here at NASA,” she countered easily. Lillian barked with laughter, and Eliza soon cracked, leaning her head back on the wall behind her as they laughed so hard their sides ached.

When they sobered up, they both stared at the bathroom with smiles on their faces. Eliza was the first to break the calm they had created.

Standing, she offered a hand down to Lillian, stating, “Come on. I don’t want to spend your birthday on a bathroom floor; let’s go out.”

Lillian smiled gratefully up at Eliza, but then hesitated. “Can we just go home?” she inquired instead.

Eliza’s expression softened. “Of course. Let’s go home.”

Twenty minutes later, they pulled into their driveway, Eliza’s car purring before she turned it off. The night wasn’t too cool as they made their way up their walkway, fingers entangling ever so slightly as they went. When they walked through the front door, Eliza announced, “I’m going to turn on CBS. Maybe they’ll rerun the Apollo 8 broadcasts we haven’t seen.”

Lillian nodded silently, slowly taking off her jacket and making her way into the kitchen. She blindly reached into the refrigerator and pulled out two beers. After she opened them, she followed Eliza into the living room. As she sat down on the couch and handed her friend her drink, Eliza looked over at her with curiosity.

“I forgot to ask you. Did you get out of your birthday party again this year?” Eliza inquired innocently. “I’ve noticed you haven’t been going to hardly any events for your father recently.” Lillian forced a neutral expression on her face and paired it with a stiff nod.

“Yeah,” she lied through her teeth. “I talked to my parents and since everything in the program is ramping up, they’ve agreed to give me more freedom.” She shot Eliza a convincing smile, and Eliza beamed at her and reached over to clutch her forearm encouragingly.

“That’s great, Lil,” she stated proudly, and Lillian’s stomach churned. She hated lying to Eliza, but she didn’t want her friend to worry either.

The phone rang a moment later, breaking the moment, and Lillian immediately jumped off the couch, knowing with a sinking feeling who was going to be on the other end of the line. Biting her cheek, she steeled herself as she reached the phone, in preparation for the conversation she was about to have. On the next ring, she picked up the phone.

“You promised!” her mother’s voice immediately screeched across the phone, and Lillian cringed, quickly glancing behind her to make sure Eliza couldn’t hear her. “You promised you would come this year!”

“Listen, Mom, I wanted to,” Lillian murmured quietly, wanting to quickly soothe her mother’s hysterics. “It’s just with Apollo 8 currently-”

Lillian heard a gruff angry voice speaking to her mother on the other end of the line, and she froze. She immediately tensed up in anticipation for what was going to come next.

“You think you’re tough, girl?” her father roared over the receiver, and Lillian forced an impassive expression on her face. “I’ve had enough of your fucking bullshit these past few years. The moment a man sets his foot on the moon, you’re done. You’re leaving NASA and marrying Lionel. If you try anything, I will get every company I’ve ever worked with to blacklist you. You’ll never step foot in a lab in this country again, am I understood?”

Lillian closed her eyes and tried to steady her breathing. She knew she had been pushing too far past the boundaries; there was only so long she could slip out from under her father’s control before he retaliated by trying to take her whole livelihood from her. And now that time was up.

“Give me a year,” she finally pleaded quietly, the sound of defeat ringing through her voice. “One last year and then I’ll do whatever you want.” She clung to the phone like it was her lifeline. It was always coming to this, she tried to comfort herself. If she could just secure one more innocent year with Eliza and NASA, she could be happy as Lionel’s arm candy, hiding away in LuthorCorp labs for the rest of her life.

She could hear her mother softly murmuring to her father, and Lillian held her breath.

“One year,” her father spat in agreement. 

Lillian jumped up, opening her mouth to respond, but before she could, the line went dead. She stood staring at her kitchen wall for a long moment before she slowly hung up the phone and clenched her eyes shut. What had she just agreed to?

She had recomposed herself before reentering the living room, keeping a neutral expression on her face, and Eliza looked up at her expectantly. “Who was it?” she inquired, opening up the blanket so Lillian could slip in right beside her.

“My parents,” Lillian responded easily.

“Wishing you a happy birthday?” Eliza asked, glancing over at Lillian with an innocent gaze.

Swallowing, Lillian nodded stiffly. “Yeah.”

“Oh, they’re playing the rerun!” Eliza then announced, reaching for the remote to turn up the TV. She quickly forgot about her conversation with Lillian, watching raptly as the three astronauts of Apollo 8 described their journey so far.

Lillian closed her eyes and took a long deep breath, steadying herself. When she reopened, she turned to her head to watch Eliza. Catching the movement out of the corner of her eye, Eliza glanced over and shot Lillian a soft smile before turning back to the TV.

Feeling a tension lift out of her shoulders, Lillian sighed and relaxed back into the couch. She only had one more year of freedom, but there wasn’t anywhere she would rather spend it.

She laid her head down on Eliza’s shoulder and let a feeling of content wash over her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> feel free to yell at me on [tumblr](https://semperpugnandi.tumblr.com/) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/semperpugnandi)

**Author's Note:**

> lmk what you thought and feel free to yell at me on [tumblr](https://semperpugnandi.tumblr.com/) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/semperpugnandi)
> 
> and i know you were all waiting for me to drop that lilliza/space inspired [playlist](https://sptfy.com/4Xmv) ;)


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